To
be facetious, one could say that the people who are good at IQ tests
are the people who are good at IQ tests. Or, more clearly, the people
who are good at IQ tests are often those who've simply done lots of
IQ tests! In other words, they've picked up a particular skill
through much practice – and that skill is being successful at IQ
tests!
There
will be many people with high IQs who offer nothing to the world.
(They may be non-entities.) Similarly, people with fairly
low IQs (within reason!) may achieve a lot in this world – even
intellectually or academically.
I
even once heard someone say that Albert Einstein had a low IQ.
Perhaps he didn't mean in the sense of Einstein actually having been tested
as such. He might have meant that had he been tested, he might not
have scored very highly. Anyway, I later found out the Einstein had an IQ of 160+ - at least according to the image above. (That shows how little I know about IQ tests. Would that make me a bad candidate for an IQ test?)
I
do know that Einstein did very badly at school. The teachers, as far
as I can recall, didn't rate him very highly.
So
perhaps IQ tests aren't good for geniuses in the sense that some
geniuses are extremely specialised. And IQ tests test a lot of things
which talented or creative people may not be good at. (How would
Mozart, for one, have faired had he been tested by a 18th-century IQ
test?)
To
be honest, I know next to nothing about IQ tests. One, I've never had
one. Two, I've never felt the need to have one.
What
Do IQ Tests Prove?
Many
people also rhetorically ask: “What do IQ tests prove?”
Well,
IQ tests do “prove” at least one thing: they prove that you are
good at the individual tests which are found within IQ tests. Since I
don't know much about IQ tests, I can only guess that IQ mathematical
tests can prove that some people are good at those areas of
mathematics. Similarly with IQ spatial tests or puzzles.
However,
the word “prove” should only really be used, strictly speaking,
in maths and logic. (It isn't even used that much in science, except
in a loose sense.) Perhaps 'demonstrate' or 'show' would be a better
word, as in:
IQ test A demonstrates that Person X is good at Test A.
What
follows from all that? It seems perfectly acceptable to conclude that
if it's been shown that someone is good at certain areas of maths,
“spatial awareness”, puzzles or whatever, then it may very well
follow that they'll also be good at things that are very distant from
such IQ tests. And that seems like a fair conclusion.
The
Limitations of IQ Tests
One
person said to me:
“IQ tests only help estimate a persons problem solving and rationalisation abilities. There's so many forms of intelligence that (again) IQ tests can't even assess.”
Yes,
though do supporters (or defenders) of IQ tests necessarily deny all
that? Won't they – or some of them – admit that IQ tests have
their limitations? Surely IQ fans won't claim that they test
everything. And if they don't claim that, then what's the big
problem with them?
It
all depends on how much importance people place on IQ tests. That's
the issue. And of course it's precisely because of that that the
issue has become politicised.
However,
to test “a person's problem solving and rationalisation abilities”
is to test a quite a lot. And it's also to test important things.
That's not to say there's nothing else to test. The remaining
question would be:
How effectively do IQ tests test a person's problem-solving and reasoning abilities?
My
adversary then went on to say:
“Many psychologists dismiss the point of IQ testing because it's limited and research hasn't been furthered for its development.”
Of
course IQ tests are limited! By definition they're limited. Though
why would that automatically be a problem? All psychological and
cognitive tests are limited. And perhaps “research hasn't been
furthered” because of the political controversy associated with IQ
tests. In fact I bet that's the primary reason.
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