Last week I took part
Last week I took part in the BBC’s national IQ test. IQ tests are something I’m very wary of for a great many reasons, from the very idea on which they’re based, through to the often poorly-thought-out implementations. When I was studying Psychology at university, we looked at a number of IQ and aptitude tests. One, which is often used by employers to screen potential employees, involved a series of reading-comprehension sections where you would read a piece (around three paragraphs) and then answer five questions on it, with answers limited to “true”, “false” or “cannot tell from the passage”. Of the fifteen questions that we looked at, the officially sanctioned answers to two of them were wrong - they stated that something was true or false, when in fact the passage only alluded at this but did not give enough information to categorically decide either way. It made me realise how low the average intelligence must be in human resources departments where they administer this type of test.
So, anyway, because of that I’ve kinda avoided tests of this sort, and also of course because I didn’t want to discover I wasn’t in fact as bright as I thought. But a couple of years ago I decided to take an online test, in the privacy of my own office so I could hide the results from anyone else if needs be. I was more than a little pleased to see my result come out at 153 (all IQ tests are designed to represent the average person as having a score of 100, with a bell-curve distribution meaning that much higher [or lower] scores become exponentially harder to achieve. A score of 150 or above is considered genius). So, of course, I didn’t hide the results, but told everyone I knew
I ummed-and-ahhed about doing the BBC test - it would be great to be proved as clever as I thought I was by such an august and trusted institution as the BBC, but on the other hand 153 is a hard score to match up to, and if I got significantly less, well, wouldn’t I end up feeling crap?
In the end, I had lots of mitigating factors lined up to explain any crapness (I was feeling rather ill that day, and had been in bed most of the day hence not exercising my brain adequately, I did the test in our living room, with the TV blaring at the other end, Anne Robinson reading out questions that I’d completed several minutes before, and Gill and Emma shouting out their guessed answers, as the kids milled about and made kid-type noises).
So I took the test. It asked me first what I thought my score would be - I said 150 (hey, let’s be modest after all… I didn’t want to end up looking silly or anything). I ran through the test - got a couple of answers wrong because the crappy Flash interface only gave a limited number of seconds for each answer, and when the time was up the next question appeared immediately, with the answer buttons in the same place as for the previous question, so in hitting the button as the last second ticked over I ended up inadvertantly answering the next question (wrongly).
I scored 133. 133??? Even given the mitigating factors that seemed depressingly low, at least compared to what I got last time. So it was with reluctance that I admitted I might not be as bright as I’d thought. Of course, Gill & Emma couldn’t understand what the problem was, 133 is a brilliant score, etc etc. I got on the BBC message board and started moaning about the Flash design (as did many others), but still felt cheated. Or perhaps my nail biting has affected me adversely.
So I was relieved (and at the same time annoyed) when I saw how the test was scored. The highest score I could have possibly got, given my age, was 137. And if I’d been 9 months over, my lowly score of 133 would have been boosted to a more respectable 139. So there was no way I could ever have got 150, why couldn’t the BBC have told me that at the time, instead of making me look stupid? Jeezus, by this scoring you have to be over 55 before you can possibly qualify as a genius.
Also reassuring was the fact that the highest scorer in the BBC’s studio audience (of about 500 people) got 135, and nationwide the highest score was 149. National averages and other results here. Interesting (and a little depressing) to see the inverse correlation between salary and IQ: non-earners scored an average of 107, and this drops with each jump in income down to £50,000+ earners who average at 93. Alcohol drinkers also score much higher than non-drinkers. Shame that there is no data on numbers of respondents etc. which would allow you to judge the significance more clearly.
All of which just reinforced my feeling that this whole thing is a bit of a ratings-grabbing bit of fun, with little real scientific basis (in as much as anything with the phrase “IQ test” in the phrase can ever have a scientific basis).