Instant IQ
Quote of the day: Talent is like a marksman who hits a target that others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target…others cannot even see. — Arthur Schopenhauer
If you don’t trust the results of the on-line IQ test I linked earlier, there’s a quicker way to figure out your IQ: use your standardized test scores. The IQ Comparison Site has tables for conversion between GRE or recent SAT scores and IQ. If you took the SAT after 1974 but before the great grade inflation of April 1995, then you need to use the
old SAT table, and your results will be more accurate.
If you’ve turned out smarter than you expected, check out the list of high IQ societies. There’s a similar list with membership numbers in the Mensa FAQ.
May 9th, 2004 at 11:47 pm
Neat! I used the old SAT table and the results were a couple of points below the online test I linked to. I switched over to the GRE table to see what happened there and was horrified, until I realized that the GRE and GMAT aren’t graded the same (g). D’oh!
May 10th, 2004 at 9:59 am
I can’t take this seriously. The GRE is now administered on a computer and if you focus all your attention and time on the first ten-fifteen questions, it does not matter whether you even read the rest - the test calculates based on the level of difficulty of questions you answered and whether you answered all the questions, and the ratios are such that you can get a higher score with a strategy. I clicked randomly through the remainder of the analytical questions after #15 without glancing at the text, and got a score in the 600s.
I’d have to take an independent test to determine IQ and I don’t think it’s really that big a deal. Although being in Mensa would impress a lot of people, street sense, (un)common sense, and intuition are more useful.
May 10th, 2004 at 11:47 pm
The SAT and GRE tables are estimates only. If you want to do your own eyeballing for the GMAT or other tests, you can use the Mensa test score requirements (98th percentile) or the Triple Nine Society qualifying scores (99.9th percentile).
I had forgotten about the new computer GRE. Note that Mensa does not accept SAT tests taken since 1994 or GRE scores from after 2001, because “these tests no longer correlate with an IQ test.” The site I linked in the entry is a few years old and probably just hasn’t caught up yet.
As for IQ being useful, it’s strongly correlated with income and and inversely with crime. I haven’t heard the same of street sense, common sense, or intuition, but then you’d have to quantify them in order to establish a correlation and I doubt that’s possible. I do agree that it’s not much use to know your IQ except as a predictor of academic success, which is the justification for most juvenile aptitude testing. It might be handy to know other people’s IQ’s, though.