My Take On: IQ Tests Part 2

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Remember when I wrote last time that IQ tests don't really measure intelligence? Well here's how. IQ tests have two scores. The first one is your raw score which is how much answers you got right. The other one is your IQ score which is your raw score compared to the raw scores of other people. This is the one that people look for in these kinds of tests. It's a genius idea, really. By knowing who's smarter than who, then you will know who is probably better than the other. However, here is a big drawback: IQ tests assume that you are of similar culture and experiences as the other people who took the test. When, say, a person from Germany takes a Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale in the US, that person will likely have really low scores on vocabulary. And depending on whether the person even understands the English instructions properly, that person might show as having mental retardation even though they are normal. That's why we have non-cultural intelligence tests. These ones measure intelligence in a way that people born from any place in the world could pass if they really were good enough. Their raw scores are also converted depending on which place they came from, so a talented farmer from Papua New Guinea could be at even toes with a mathematician from Northern Ireland. The only caveat though is that these forms of intelligence tests are unlike IQ tests that measure your overall intelligence, aka general intelligence. They instead measure specific intelligence, which is how smart you are in a particular area like reading, writing, or even dancing! For many scientists and clinicians, IQ tests are still very important. I just hope that these kinds of tests are used by the right people with the right methods and intentions. Thanks for reading!