IQ tests, as I recall, are generally pretty decent at their originally intended purpose of predicting performance in the mainstream school system (at least up through high school, not sure about college), because the skills and knowledge it measures strongly overlaps with the skills and knowledge that match well with the current schooling system.
People have subsequently attempted to take this extremely limited and borderline circular usage (Do well on your IQ test? Do well in school. Do well in school? Do well on your IQ test) to be broadly meaningful, which is deeply flawed in a number of ways. And now, of course, there’s attempts to update IQ to reflect a broader set of skills, which is sort of a step in the right direction but still fundamentally flawed in its attempt to reduce an incredibly broad set of different skills and areas of knowledge into a single number that you can rank on a scoreboard against others’ like that’s remotely meaningful.
And of course, by skills, I mean not just the things it’s supposed to measure like math proficiency, vocabulary, etc., but also skills implicit to the nature of the test like focus, auditory and visual processing, ability to actually provide a definition for words vs. knowing how to use them but not knowing how to rattle off dictionary-style definitions, etc., all of which are also skills that are advantageous in our education system as it is currently structured but which aren’t really a measure of other areas of intelligence.
Sadly, we as a society, at least in the Anglosphere that I’m familiar with, have a bad habit of prioritizing measurements that give us easy numbers to work with but don’t really reflect reality that well over more complicated methods of assessment that might be more difficult to work with but actually work better.
It’s only a rough estimate. For some selectors.
nothing meaningful should be done to you, good or bad, just because of your iq
IQ tests, as I recall, are generally pretty decent at their originally intended purpose of predicting performance in the mainstream school system (at least up through high school, not sure about college), because the skills and knowledge it measures strongly overlaps with the skills and knowledge that match well with the current schooling system.
People have subsequently attempted to take this extremely limited and borderline circular usage (Do well on your IQ test? Do well in school. Do well in school? Do well on your IQ test) to be broadly meaningful, which is deeply flawed in a number of ways. And now, of course, there’s attempts to update IQ to reflect a broader set of skills, which is sort of a step in the right direction but still fundamentally flawed in its attempt to reduce an incredibly broad set of different skills and areas of knowledge into a single number that you can rank on a scoreboard against others’ like that’s remotely meaningful.
And of course, by skills, I mean not just the things it’s supposed to measure like math proficiency, vocabulary, etc., but also skills implicit to the nature of the test like focus, auditory and visual processing, ability to actually provide a definition for words vs. knowing how to use them but not knowing how to rattle off dictionary-style definitions, etc., all of which are also skills that are advantageous in our education system as it is currently structured but which aren’t really a measure of other areas of intelligence.
Sadly, we as a society, at least in the Anglosphere that I’m familiar with, have a bad habit of prioritizing measurements that give us easy numbers to work with but don’t really reflect reality that well over more complicated methods of assessment that might be more difficult to work with but actually work better.
Ha, thanks for the whole writeup! And yeah, the general assumption “IQ = intelligence” is matching your conclusion
rougher than asphalt