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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   4133 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

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I was curious about the Wonderlic test after seeing it referenced in a comment sometime this week, so I took a look. Is this practice website actually accurate to the content of the test? I found it really quite easy, some trouble with not being familiar with Imperial units and American coinage aside.

"Your score is 38 / 50"

42 out of 50 answered, 4 wrong.

In my defense, I was distracted by my child running and shouting all over the place.

And I misunderstood the "fold triangles into solid shape" questions entirely.

24/25, barely made it. It seems like it is very culturally dependent, though I have a hard time imagining anyone born in the USA scoring 10/25.

I got a bit annoyed at

What number comes next in the series, 31, 1031, 402, 16, ____?

which I ended up spending over a minute on (and still got wrong, though found the answer online).

Agree on both (had trouble with the America-centric questions, or with terminology I hadn’t seen before), yet that’s what’s being advertised - 20/50 is supposed to be roughly IQ = 100, and apparently there was a published thing in the 1980s which showed average scores for NFL players by position (ranging from 16 to 26). Other sites show averages for other professions, though unsourced; apparently nurses average 23 and chemists 31?

Just seems very low to me.

With 4 multiple choice answers, the expected result from random guessing would be 12.5. Get 10 answers right, randomly guess on the rest, and you're average.

I figure the time constraint is what kills people's points, but if you know that will be the limiting factor up front, you could just say make sure you stick to 10 seconds per question, guess on ones you don't know, and... almost certainly get above average? It's quite easy to game.

Alternatively, maybe these questions are easier than the actual test, or the knowledge it's testing is more widely known today than it was originally.

Scores of 10 or below in the wonderlic test are counted as ‘functionally illiterate’ rather than ‘low IQ’ for that reason.

This was the 25-question short version though, so I'd expect 10/25 to very roughly correspond to 20/50, with a significantly increased measurement error. 20/50 is supposed to be average.

Also crazy: the entire Jordan v. New London case was because a police department automatically rejected people for getting 28/50 or higher because they were too smart.

Ah, my mistake there then.

42/50, but I didn't know what to expect and didn't particularly care about the results. I knew I got about three questions wrong as soon as I clicked "next". The test itself looks pretty "grindable" to me. Vocabulary questions are not grindable beyond knowing what to expect (X is to Y is as what is to Z, similar-opposite-unrelated), but are the easiest, logical questions are grindable (I guess most "normies" fail the "A implies B, A is false, is B false?" question), maths questions are super grindable (there's a bunch of mental math tricks that people simply don't keep in their arsenal now that they actually carry a calculator with them everywhere, plus a bunch of "how to discard the obviously wrong answer" tricks). With a few cram sessions you could probably get people to reliably score five to ten points higher.

It's still a good proxy for intelligence. A couple of years ago I binged on YouTube USE math prep videos. USE is the combined HS graduation/college entry exam in Russia, and your score decides if you can get into the MSU or another prestigious university or not. Kids in the stream chat were super serious about cataloguing every possible shortcut to tackling the problems, and at first I was kinda disappointed by this approach, using raw brainpower sounded fairer.

But then I realized: you still need that raw brainpower to catalogue and store these tricks, to select the right one and apply it correctly. Yes, Alice that is even a bit smarter than Bob can get a lower score because Bob spent more time on exam prep, but is it really that bad? Why shouldn't we reward people that can demonstrate diligence and perseverance in addition to raw mathematical brainpower?

Why shouldn't we reward people that can demonstrate diligence and perseverance in addition to raw mathematical brainpower?

It depends on what job you are selecting for. College admissions are a hammer when they should be scalpels.

A rough example; Someone going to college for a math degree might be interested in Research Mathematics or becoming an Actuary.

For the former, you should probably heavily weigh raw mathematical brainpower more. For the latter, you should weigh conscientiousness more.

These two people with radically different brain structures (IMO) and expectations from their future peers; but are made to take the same tests/exams.

Tangentially, if you are of the former type, you might not like the latter for various visceral reasons.

I went to college for Electrical Engineering. I was passionate about it and rarely ever "studied" in any flashy way. Then there were the kids with flashcards and fancy colored notes and whatnot. They often got better grades than me, but were often "worse" engineers. They sucked at programming, didn't know anything outside of the books, could not derive things from first principles if not explicitly mentioned in class, etc.

Those people should be working at powerplants, I should be working at a startup that makes robots.

DNF. Got bored around question 24 and quit. I wonder how some football players manage to score lower than 10/50. Maybe they get bored easily like me.

More likely because they were borderline illiterate.

The wonderlic is not a pure IQ test because it presupposes literacy, basic cultural knowledge, etc. people who read on a 1st or 2nd grade level despite being adults will do poorly on it regardless of if the reason is poor education or low IQ.

And there’s lots of football players who read on an early elementary school level.

43/50 time was a major factor in mistakes, several I knew immediately I had gotten it wrong when I clicked next.

I didn't find it that easy. I was only able to get to question 38 before the time ran out and my score was 34/50. Of course, the questions were easy, but some of the ones that required doing a bunch of arithmetic in my head took a while.

I didn't know it would be that hard to finish in time, so I took a break to go to the bathroom and get a glass of water which cost me some time. I'm also a bit sleed deprived and hung over.

I've had my intelligence tested much more thoroughly than this and was put at the 99th percentile.

48/50. Had a few guesses due to running out of time, so easily could have had a 45/50. Either way, this test is judging people who’s skill lies in catching an oval ball and beating the crap out of each other. The test is meant to be easy and many quite good players have scored very poorly (thinking about Frank Gore in particular).

Got 21/25 while watching tv playing on my phone. So a 42.

But half the people here probably have perfect SAT scores so I’m assuming that’s above average here but well above average everywhere else. My guess is the average NYT reader would be around 32.

I got 48/50 on the test. It was pretty similar in difficulty to the practice CFAT, the aptitude test for the Canadian military that I'm planning to apply to soon. I think most Canadians/Americans are pretty bad at mental math, since it's a skill that very rarely comes up, but I've always enjoyed mental math and would often do homework problems mentally even if a calculator was available.

The American education system also tends to strongly discourage students in ‘average tracks’ as I would call them- so not remedial or GT- from ever doing mental math.

Wonderlic will always sound like a make-up brand to me. "This Wonderlic eyeshadow will pair perfectly with your houndstooth suit from Jane Street!"

with your houndstooth suit from Jane Street

I love my new camlhair suit from them.

It sounded like some sort of brand of rainbow sprinkles to me for some reason!

The full 50 question test is supposed to be completed in 12 minutes, a short practice test would need to be done in less time than that. Keep in mind it's probably timed for marking a scantron page, too.

No, it is not. I have taken it and it is meant to be easily graded and interpreted by a hiring manager. No scantron is involved.

Yes. Bear in mind that, like most motteizeans, you’re probably well above average in IQ, so it should be easier for you.

The wonderlic test is more about finishing questions- it’s a timed test and in practice most people do not finish- than about correct answers. It’s a proxy for IQ score for average Americans and doesn’t have much utility outside of them, and like many proxies, tends to break down at the tail ends(famously it has no ability to distinguish low IQ from actually literally retarded- although, it doesn’t seem like conventional IQ tests are great at doing that either).

I got 48/50 while having to look up what exactly a nickel or a dime was or how many ounces were in a pound, or having to think back to what other historical events were near the Declaration of Independence (before realizing that the question gave other dates that were obviously wrong), which I assume most Americans wouldn’t need to. I suppose it’s the typical mind fallacy at work, but I was astonished to read that the average IQ=100 person would score 20.

Most questions are indeed quite easy, the challenge mainly comes from processing speed - quite a few people will simply take too long to puzzle through word problems, or not understand how to do quick estimations on the mathy questions.

exactly. the speed is what makes it hard and is why the scores are normally distributed. otherwise there would be no way to discriminate ability beyond basic proficiency of math/verbal.

Huh.

I’m overestimating how quick people are on their feet then, it seems.

38/50. Yeah, it was easy. Not American but Im used to imperial units but the coinage one I got wrong.

It shouldn't include GK questions, though. I liked the inclusion of mental math, tries to trip you up with multiple-tenths of a fraction, but the correct answers are obvious.

I actually got tripped up by what was meant by “tenths place” (or something similar), because I’d never seen that before!

I have had to take "aptitude" tests before as part of job application processes and some of the types of questions in that practice test are familiar to me (I am not American either).

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