AoS Army Harmonizer

Seriously can we just ban trolls? that is against the rules. (posted in this very thread!)

 

What is against the rules?

 

according to http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/forum-rules.39/, most of what you post is.

 

Memes for the meme god!

 

Can attest to that, went through the process when I was in 7th grade as part of the IAAY (Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth) through Johns Hopkins. Took my SAT's and an IQ test when I was 13 (god that was sooo long ago lol). I scored a 1520 overall on the old 1600 point scale, the new one is to 2400 for which my score would translate to approx 2290.

 

There's also the fact that you have an IQ value for different subparts of your intellect (e.g. spatial vs. reasoning) which ultimatly is aggregated into the single score we know. If there are large discrepancies between these various subparts it can lead to issues. For example you can have increadible reasoning skills, but be utterly incapable of actually explaining what's going on in your head to someone else.

Nah, just random numbers to point out that towards the extremes it gets inaccurate due to how the tests work.

Some of the more obvious questions on the tests where your culture is going to matter:

• give the next logical number in this sequence
• Next logical shape/thing in this sequence
  
• name the opposite of this word
• define this word
  
• memories this string of words (faaaaaaaaaaaaaar easier if you know the language )
• reasoning puzzles like this one: which is a puzzle chinese kindergartners are expected to solve instantly and western adults tend to actually need time for as the clue relies on the logic in the drawing of a real world parking lot, not on the logic in the visible number sequence.

Then there's also the fact that certain cultures place more or less value on certain skills. And the IQ tests are of course based on these values. For example an IQ test tends to have far more memorization questions than it does about spatial reasoning. It's one of the reasons why asian countries tend to score relativly high, they place heavy emphasis on memorization which is a great asset to have when making IQ tests. On the other hand, places with bad formal education score relativly low due them never really developing their skills.

Of course the makers try to limit this as much as possible. And current tests are far better than older ones. But it's still an important flaw in them that needs to be taken into account when you make someone do the test.

 

Hence the need to do it in the correct language and the subdivision in the various subcatagories which they of course try to balance out. But there is of course a limit to how well you can balance that. After all, who's to decide what's more "valuable" your ability to reason abstractly internally, or you're ability to express whatever it is you think to another or spatial reasoning, or whatever other catagory there is.

You can actually gain quite some points just by practising. I think the world record is made by someone who explicitly practised for it. And she went up quite a lot of points over her various tries. Admittadly, she was already at the very edge, so getting one or two more correct anwsers can translate into fairly impressive swings in terms of IQ.
In general though I think the main issue was that it's easy to score relativly low due to aforementioned problems of culture & langauge barriers while scoring relativly high due to excessive practise was very difficult.

Also, any question can be made easier by prior knowledge, or things your used to. Here's a great example, much like the chinese riddle earlier:

Depending on where you're from you'l come to a different anwser using the exact same reasoning. Which makes making questions for something like this very difficult.

This is probably also why ultimatly you only really care about which broad catagory you end up in, and not the precise score. It makes a bit of an error margin acceptable

 

she didn't do it for the mensa one, she practised for a "normal" one with a psychologist. Which is one that isn't capped. Admittadly she also made it her life's goal and studied excessivly for it, so she's bound to be an outlier.

Also, going from 110 to 114 would mean going from the 70-ish percentile to the 80-ish percentile (exact numbers depend on the specific test). Which is quite a massive improvement.
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Anyway point remains, practise does pay off