Let’s have some fun today! As I’m sure you already know, IQ – Intelligence Quotient – is a relatively meaningless but sometimes clinically useful assessment of how a being performs on certain types of tests. The average IQ is 100; I remember a story my grandfather told about someone who just couldn’t seem grasp what “average IQ” actually means, though, and kept, while my grandfather was delivering a lecture, trying to understand why the average IQ of a dolphin, which had been his question, is 100. So is a house cat’s. So is a falcon’s, or a goldfish’s. The thing is, the guy actually wanted to know what the cetacean’s IQ would be on a human scale, and never did get why this question is fundamentally flawed in the first place.
IQ tests also only cover one kind of intelligence. While in general someone with a very high IQ can be called “intelligent” in the way of dealing with things by utilizing the available information in the handiest way possible and drawing conclusions about possible futures, excelling at critical thinking, making well-considered decisions, and so on, it’s also so that emotional intelligence often (not always!) lags far behind in such cases: so-called super-geniuses are often (not always!) unable to sustain nurturing long-term relationships and/or are prone to tantrums or self-isolation, while many (not all!) people with a lower-than-average IQ are able to simply and straightforwardly solve problems that make “smarter” people frantic, focus on tasks with far greater efficiency, and emotionally and practically support others and even entire communities seemingly without having to work at it. Intellectual and emotional intelligence are anyway only two of the several-at-least kinds humans play around with in our fancy meat-computer brains. The number really is in a very large sense empty information.
When I was young (long, LONG before the Internet), the adult who raised me denied me an IQ test. I don’t mean I asked to go get one this one time and was off-handedly refused, no. When said adult found out that I was reading mainstream horror novels at the age of 15, these were immediately blamed for my unhappiness and “stubborn, defiant” behavior, leading to the book burning incident which, although it happened when I was the age my kid is now (so some 36 years ago), remains a gaping, unhealed, unforgivable wound. Somehow, this didn’t improve my general mood and even added quite a sheen of “resentful attitude” to much of our interaction, so I was referred to a psychologist, and one of the first things he wanted to do was administer the absolutely standard packet of intake tests given to everyone. The IQ test was refused. You may wonder about that, but if you do, you weren’t raised by someone always, ALWAYS looking for the way in which people were trying to GET AT a person. Where were the (definitely personally-intended) pitfalls, the traps, the gaping uncertainties, the blatant digs, the subtle mockery in any interaction?
How does that apply to an IQ test? Well, said adult’s reasoning – explained to me in one of the inescapable car-ride monologues about my general inadequacies as a human being – was the following: if the test returned a higher-than-average IQ, I would immediately decide that I was better than everybody, start putting on airs, lord my imagined enormous intellect over everyone, and generally become an insufferable, useless ass. If, on the other hand, the test returned a LOWER than average number, I would (obviously) stop trying to do anything, assume everybody else was now supposed to take care of me hand and foot because I was helpless, use that number like a crutch for the rest of my life making people feel sorry for me and getting them to do my work for me, learn nothing, never achieve anything, and generally become an insufferable, useless ass.
What I’m going to do today is have a little fun. I’m going to take a bunch of free online IQ tests and see what happens, sort-of-live-blogging the results as I write this entry. I’m sure you’re aware that really only a couple of tests, like the WAIS, when administered by a professional, are in any meaningful way an accurate reflection of this assessive cipher, but the very inherent pointlessness of this exercise is one reason this is going to be fun! I’m kind of hoping to see a wide distribution of numbers, varying greatly between the tests, but hey, this is science, so what I hope has nothing to do with it. My actual hypothesis is that they’ll all probably turn out kind of similar. Let’s find out!
For my initial research I relied on a Google search on the terms “free online IQ test”. Ooooh, exciting! I’m going to do several in the order they appear, skipping any that are too similar to ones already done, and report individually.
Our first test can be found at this link: 123test.com/iq-test/. Oh, this link has two! A “culture fair” test that says it’s “certified”, and a “classical” one bearing no such label. According to the text, the former measures abstract reasoning, the other logic and spatial reasoning and so on. Gosh, what to do, what to do… Obviously, I shall take both.
The “culture fair” test I found to be rather simplistic, but at the same time involved a type of mathematical logic that often gives me trouble; I’m somewhat discalculic. Obviously, this page encourages me to seek out the pay-for-it version of the analysis for a “more accurate” result, but that’s not happening; I don’t have any money anyway. So, the result! My score on this test “lies between 108 and 124”. Moving on to the “classical”.
Well, results (which are useless at only two data points, especially from the same source) already point toward my hypothesis: the “classical” test returned a scale of 105 – 120. It also includes a, to me, hilarious bit of encouragement (see following screenshot).
Moving on to our next website, to be found at http://www.free-iqtest.net/, I pronounce the website itself to be clunky and full of ads, with some of those deceptiverts that look like the button to move on to the next page. The questions were almost all spatial-orientation and math, the latter of which, again, gives me fits. On this one, I scored 129.
The next site I visited, https://www.uv.es/~buso/iq/index_en.html, turns out to be the same test as above, so I didn’t take it, but the site is much better laid out and provides the opportunity to take the test in Spanish. I thought you might like to know that.
And now this brings us to https://iqtest.com/, which says its questions are “fun” (yay!) and has a picture of Einstein on the splash page. It says that this test is “original” and the “most scientifically valid free IQ test available online today”, as well as being “the world’s leading online IQ test”. Gosh, wow! Let’s give it a run for its money!
OK, this one WAS a fun test! The questions were much more logic-based and reasoning-oriented than “just do this math and rotate these polygons” and I had a good time! They don’t put the result right on the page, you need to enter your e-mail address and then it’s sent to you. Checking… Here we go: 135! See, I do better when it’s not all math. This is close to the result the time I did, finally, manage to take the WAIS under the guidance of a psychologist something like 30 years ago. The test does also end with an ad to get an expanded profile for money; nothing wrong with that, we all need to make a buck. I expect it’s the norm.
So how many is that, now? Four… two from the same page. Better throw in a couple more; this is no kind of a sampling, even for such a small and sloppy “study”. So let’s see… I’ll try this one…
https://www.funeducation.com/Tests/IQTest/TakeTest.aspx.
Oh nifty! It says it’s a “premium psychometric exam with instant PhD-Certified results” – that MUST be good, right? ;) Hmmm. Let’s take a look!
OK, I found this one to also be ad-filled, and you have to make an account at the end to see your results, but the questions, albeit math-heavy as usual, were kind of fun. And my result is… drumroll please!… 98?!? Ummm, wow. I mean, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with a 98 IQ but this is pretty far off every other test I’ve ever taken and the questions weren’t all that hard. Great, now I need to do at least 2 more to be satisfied that this one’s an anomalous outlier.
Here’s one: The International IQ Test! It says it “will evaluate, through 40 questions, [my] ability to learn, to understand, to form concepts, to process information, and to apply logic and reason.” Sounds good! Here we go… Aaaaand done. What an absolutely dreary test, pretty much all “choose which diagram comes next”... and then what happens at the end? They expect me to pay to get my score! Are you kidding me? Sure, for lots of people five bucks isn’t a lot of money, but that’s not the point. Even if I had the money, instead of needing to use it for food and stuff, I’d be offended. If people have to pay for something, tell them up front, don’t lead them through a slog of a logic test first. Thhhpt. Moving on.
OK, here we have one at https://www.test-iq.org/, which states that it is “the most accurate online IQ Test”. In I go. All “choose the shape” questions, not a good start… Never mind, it’s exactly the same questions, in the same order, as one or another of the above. Let’s try https://iqtestprep.com/. Well, for starters it says I can take the 2021 test… Given that I’m writing this in June, 2020, that sounds kind of interesting. I see that you can buy downloads of the real tests, the WAIS and so on. I am now clicking on “take long IQ test” for one of their freebies. And the numbers are in! After quite a slog through mostly general knowledge questions with math thrown in, I get a scale of 138 – 162. Nifty! And also completely worthless: one question was literally “how many bananas are in a dozen”. Throwaway test. I realize I forgot to take their 2021 test, but I admit I can’t be much bothered at this point.
I’m getting mightily weary now of mentally rotating polyhedrons and figuring out how many lemons someone can get for 84 cents and failing to misinterpret Venn diagrams, and I should get on with whipping up an image for this post and doing something else with my life, so I’m going to do a new search for something fun to go out on before rendering my scholarly conclusions into pixels for you to stare at. Here we go: http://www.eliteskills.com/quiz/, “Are you a genius or a redneck?” I’ll just knock myself out. Oh my… just… NO. I couldn’t get past the third question, which reads (sic), “Bob sandal company hired joe to carry its shipmen. it gets highjacked. there is 30 pairs, they took 2 shoe laces how many shoe laces were left?”
You know what, that’s it. I’ve about tested myself out, here, and if I never have to choose the fake maritime flag that best completes the row again it will be too soon. According to these, my IQ lies firmly somewhere between 98 and 162. It is my learned and totally highly valuable opinion that the answer to the non-burning, unasked question, “Free online IQ tests – useful windows into the intellect or total bunkum?” is, well, pretty damn obvious. This has been a lark... which shall not bear repeating.
Stay safe, stay well, be happy.
Enjoy this picture of a small man in my garden and his affectionate pet wolf spider, who is carrying her egg sack behind her.
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I took an intelligence test on an Iranian site (<a href="https://esanj.ir/cattell-intelligence-test-online"> تست هوش کتل بزرگسالان </a>). What is the difference between intelligence tests? Which test is the most valid?