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Anybody down to take an online IQ test? It's not timed but according to the site takes up to 20 minutes to complete.
Feel free to share your scores. I'll go first.
Full Scale: 138
Memory: 136
Verbal: 137
Spatial: 141
I'm not surprised my memory was the lowest of the three, I feel like I've always had a bad memory (and I hate that card game called Memory where you flip over the cards to make pairs.) I always wonder if the synonym thing is really the best way to measure verbal intelligence: I just don't care to memorize obscure words which I feel drags my score down but it just seems like a waste of time to remember words that I never encounter and can simply look up the other 99 percent of the time that I'm not taking an online IQ test. Besides that, if I can imagine that a word means something else, that isn't really valued in this test either, but it would be useful if I was writing poetry or a song or something. (Like if the word is "big" and a syononym option is "ebullient," I know that ebullient doesn't mean big but spiritually, to me, it has the essence of bigness...) But I guess the intelligence to override my imagination is what the test measures. I'd rather be imaginative than book smart though, really. The spatial portion was probably the closest to measuring "imagination" in that you need to imagine the shapes rotated in your mind. I feel like I used to be much faster at this, I found myself rechecking my answers quite a few times (of course the test was untimed so I could do that without penalty.)
My results:
Full scale: 136
Memory: 132 (VM 76/85, EM 15/26)
Verbal: 137 (V 25/34, A 22/27)
Spatial: 136 (MR 16/17, CP 13/18)
It is almost midnight for me, so I was fairly tired, but judging from other comments this is standard (in practice - who's actually going to block out some prime focus time in the midday to do an unmoderated online IQ test?)
My thoughts on the test sections:
Visual memory
I think this was a pretty good test in being robust to gaming - the only issue I can think of is the question of whether you can move your mouse into a convenient position whilst the image plays (I decided the fair thing to do is to not touch your mouse at all until the animation finishes)
Exposure memory
This felt like the most "IQ"ish test for me, in that there was no conscious thinking at all. I initially planned to just rapidly repeat the sequence to myself as it played, then I realised I can't articulate an image like this in words in a fraction of second. (Was there anyone who could actually generate short verbal encodings for the icons on the fly?)
My strategy was to just passively consume it and then just click whatever icons "spoke" to me without thinking (and then adding in any others I remembered properly with a few seconds conscious recall)
Vocab
I had heard before that Vocab is extremely g-loaded, and this EOK article gives r=0.8 (I haven't read the article though, I just skipped to the table)
I always found this really weird. When I first started believing in IQ (as a measure of something beyond "how well you do IQ tests") I had always assumed that any word stuff would be less g-loaded than "maths" stuff like shape rotation (because STEM people are smarter than humanities people) - I suppose since we hear/read so many words, even really weird ones like "diaphanous" come up at least once, and if you're more intelligent, you process your stimuli more efficiently, so fewer strange words and concepts fly over your head.
Anagram
I think this is the worst subtest. Some other tests are gameable in this specific interface, as there is no time limit, and they could just be fixed by adding a timer.
But I know from personal experience that anagram solving are extremely trainable - I have a friend (of similar intelligence to me, based on exam results and working together) who can unscramble 9 letter anagrams in seconds (even using bizarre words), as he enjoys playing "word games" like this, and knows various patterns, heuristics, etc. I believe he would easily max out this test.
Mental Rotations
As @Pigeon pointed out, the shape rotation was too easy (I got 16/17, and I believe it would have been 17/17 if I had used my \infty time correctly and checked my work properly), especially without a timer. I just did a "mental rotation" without much effort or strain (I suppose if you didn't partition the shape into "plane" + "protrusion" it might have been hard, but I suppose you need good spatial intelligence to notice something like this)
Center Points
After the test, I looked it up - it turns out this is a "thing" - it's called the Geometric Median, and there does not appear to be a simple "trick" that allows you to estimate it in your head.
I'm not sure to what extent they wanted us to just go on vibes for this one (The most advanced maths I used here was to count the number of squares in each group when they were clearly clustered) - I remember around Q10-ish I realised there were 24 questions and got impatient and started almost instant-answering a lot of questions.
Also - I realise the vague "mental picture" I had for this problem was completely off - I did not clock that the optimising set has to be convex (since the objective is convex), and had mental images of things like arcs or isolated points (and I think I even hallucinated correct answers of this form in my memory as I progressed through the rounds - maybe because the first question, of a 2x2 square doesn't look convex since the guide answer doesn't include the 2x2 itself)
This doesn't massively effect the actual problem, but curious if anyone else also had the same wrong picture in their minds? I don't know why, but it still feels sort of wrong to me that the objective is convex (even with really weird point placements, you can't get any local optima?) - but on the other hand... it's literally a sum of convex functions! This feels like quite a big oversight on my part, hopefully I was just tired...?
Amongst my close friends in undergrad, there used to be a guy who had a ~150 IQ (he was the only member of the group who had it measured "properly" by a professional - he had a psychologist friend and he agreed to be one of the test subjects for something), and he was noticeably duller than the rest of us in [hard STEM subject we all studied] - this was evidenced objectively in exam results (and he worked to try get good results) I'm not sure if he is just one of those unfortunate people on the vertex of the functionality/IQ ellipse, or if it really was just a "culture" issue (maybe he was just overloaded with extra-curriculars, he had test-anxiety, etc - normally I'd discount those explanations as cope - but then... 150 IQ!)
Anyways, I always secretly hoped/fantasised that maybe the 150IQ really did correspond to the expected level of functionality, and that I was actually more functional - so maybe I was actually some kind of genius with a +4 sigma IQ (and I've never done genius things like getting an IMO gold medal because something something environment something something Newton was an unremarkable undergraduate something something) - so it was a little disheartening to have my unlikely fantasy extinguished completely.
And I think this is part of why I've never actually taken the effort to find an online IQ test (despite thinking about IQ and intelligence, and even talking about it with friends, a lot) - but obviously that was bad and irrational. More information can only ever add utility, because you can always do whatever you want anyways. I can already face the reality of having a 136IQ because I've been living it for my whole life, that which can be killed by the truth should perish, the cat was already dead before I opened the box, etc
Maybe he was mentally ill/traumatized. That can wreck cognitive performance.
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Not surprised that memory was bad, I’ve never been good at it. The whole thing is 10 points lower than last time I took a likely equally inaccurate test 10 years ago, which seems like it probably lines up with age, impact, and the kind of people I usually hang out with.
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The gizmo says I'm comparatively stupid in an isolated way.
Memory 109 Verbal 138 Spatial 149
Mostly got dinged on the first memory sub-test. This is possibly more interesting than the high-score all around or low-score all-around options.
The first one was the spatial one, right? I found that one to be a breeze (well, it took some focus to hold everything in my head, but I was nearly always confident that I got everything right), but was really struggling the whole time for the icon recognition one. Interesting that we disagree there, rather than the same things being harder/easier for everyone.
Yep. Have you seen the videos of chimpanzees doing similar tasks? They're super good, so I guess it's plausible for it not to covary with the other abilities. On the other hand, it's easy to come up with hypotheses as to why one might do idiosyncratically well or poorly on any given test. I assume that clinical grade measures have more parts to try and average this out.
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Despite being an ESL peasant I thought I had a pretty solid vocabulary for English, but there were quite a few words here I had never seen before. Does the list include some words that don't even exist? :P
I got a much worse score than I did on a clinically administered full battery test (in my native language) as a younger man. Perhaps aging and my chronic health issue have wrecked my brain more than I expected, or this test isn't comprehensive enough to give accurate results. Did get more confirmation of the fact that my memory just doesn't work that well though. Now I feel a bit more impetus to actually try to improve it, so taking this test wasn't a waste of time.
Yeah, I remember doing well on previous vocab quizzes posted here but there were some suspicious head scratchers in this one. It's not so much that I wasn't sure what they might mean so much as even as a native speaker I'd never seen them before. Didn't stop and check though.
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According to this very reliable test which leads with
I get
Apparently I'm a wordcel.
I don't find these results particularly plausible - SAT and GRE scores give me an estimate almost 1 sigma lower, and I'm more inclined to trust those. Still, this felt more like an intelligence test than Raven's Progressive Bitwise Operator Familiarity Test.
The center point one was interesting, and I struggled to find a physical analogue for the question (minimizing the sum of euclidean distances, which is not the same as finding the average point or the same as attaching a spring from a mass to each point and minimizing tension). Which I suppose reinforces my wordceldom.
I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure
For verbal I think it might be "I used to play a lot of Scrabble which trivialized the anagram task". I'd like to say my scores on the other tasks seem accurate except that for things like mental rotation I definitely struggle in real-world contexts (e.g. getting all the vector math right in a ray tracer) and yet I (and everyone else here who posted a score on that section) got a perfect score.
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Huh, odd, the percentiles seemed fine for me as compared with standardized tests like the SAT, and you're one of the people on this board who feel a bit smarter than me.
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Did it while a little distracted, went away to shower and do other things, did try to concentrate for the timed tasks, also I took this near midnight so might be a little sleepy
I'm surprised my memory and spatial is that high, and that my verbal is that low — historically formal IQ tests have pinned me as having significantly higher verbal IQ. I will blame it on English being a second language of mine (even if I am fluent), but I'm not sure it explains the disparity between thesynonym-matching and the unscrambling-words tasks. I was barely able to get any of the 5-letter words unscrambled. (For reference the previous LSAT thing that was floating around a while ago (?) was easy as shit in comparison, 5/5 no sweat — was the LSAT supposed to be a good proxy of verbal IQ?)
Probably could've gotten a bit higher on the CP puzzles if I didn't rush and actually reasoned my way through some of these but then I suppose it's fairly pointless if you actually idk do it? Was I supposed to run purely on intuition on this?
Why so many excuses and humblebrags from someone who got a great score?
I actually think that it was probably a bit inaccurate and it might have overestimated my spatial/nonverbal IQ (as I thought the spatial elements could be gamed a bit too easily), but most of the soul-searching is due to being quite perplexed at my lower verbal score. Previous estimations/tests of my verbal IQ returned a score, like, >10 points above my nonverbal IQ.
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I think 135 is really good for verbal if English is your second language so I'm impressed personally. I did the same technique with the shape rotation that you described (identify the one plane then the other sticking out part.) I honestly already forget what the CP part of the test was so I can't comment on your questions at the end
English is my second language but I did start learning it very early, and often it feels more like a co-first language for me, so it still feels a bit off. I'm wondering if the poor ability in matching letters is due to spending quite a lot of time with logographic scripts as well esp. early on in life, so maybe on some level I treat words in alphabetical languages like independent glyphs?
I think the test-makers are a bit too optimistic if they think more time wouldn't help with the shape rotation portion; a monkey could do it given enough time and if it discovers a reliable method.
The CP puzzles were theguess where the midpoint of all the dots are puzzle
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I have done this test before, is it still accurate after 3-4 tries in as many years insofar as training for the test is concerned?
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Full scale: 111
Memory: 101
Verbal: 140
Spatial: 107
Not even a little surprised that I'm a wordcel rather than a shape rotator. In future, if you see one of my posts and think it's badly argued, feel free to discount my reasoning accordingly based on the results posted above.
I think it's interesting that someone could have such uneven results... Do you think you could like, practice and train at the memory and spatial tasks and get better at them over time if you tried? Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills? Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?
Of course not - I wish these tasks came naturally to me the way they do to so many others.
When I did my Leaving Cert (Irish university entrance exam), I got a B in both English and maths. But I do think that, in general, I didn't have to work half as hard at English as I did at maths.
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Full Scale: 143
Memory: 144
Verbal: 135
Spatial: 144
This is close to the score I typically get on the "obvious crap" "IQ tests" that are commonly encountered on the internet, so I'm not in a hurry to apply for Mensa yet.
Spoilers for the test methodology.
They say their scores are normalized based on the slice of the population that takes tests. I wonder what's the real distribution of people who took this specific test w.r.t. their scores.
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Full: 149
Memory: 143. I was way better at the patterns than the icons. (VM: 84/85. EM: 18/26)
Verbal: 149. Probably could have gotten a touch more if I were more strategic on the vocabulary. (V:31/34) (A:23/27)
Sptaial: 144 (MR:17/17) (CP:15/18)
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