In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test. One page 5-6, he describes taking the Vocabulary subtest:
…If you have spent your professional life as an editor of a first-rate magazine, you ought to have a pretty good vocabulary, and the WAIS confirms that I do. The drill in this subtest is as follows. Your examiner reads off a list of words–thirty-five in my case–and asks you to define them. If you give a superior answer, going to the heart of the meaning, you get two points; if your answer seems to show only some general understanding of the context in which the word might be used, you get one point; if the answer totally misses the point, you get a goose egg. I got two points on thirty-three of the definitions and one point twice. When [examiner] Stern and I sat down after the test and went over the results, I found myself sadly agreeing that the two one-pointers had in fact reflected somewhat wobbly answers.
Based on the above we can infer that Seligman got a raw score of 68/70 on the Vocabulary subtest. According to the WAIS-R manual, this equates to a scaled score of 17 in the peak age group (20-34) and also 17 in Seligman’s age group (55-64), equivalent to an IQ of 135 (U.S. norms; 134 U.S. white norms) on this one subtest.
[Update Nov 20/2015: because WAIS-R norms were a decade old when Seligman was tested, and the Flynn effect increased WAIS Vocabulary scaled scores by 0.35 points a decade from 1978 to 1995 (Flynn, 2012), his scaled scores must be reduced to 16.65 (IQ 133, U.S. norms, IQ 132 U.S. white norms).]
On page 6 Seligman writes:
Many people do not quite see why vocabulary should be tested in an exercise that is supposed to be measuring mental ability. Their objection: that vocabulary mainly reflects acquired knowledge rather than the ability to learn. In fact, vocabulary is a pretty good proxy for overall IQ: if a professional tester had to make do with just one of the subtests, he would probably land on Vocabulary. The reason it correlates so powerfully with IQ is that you build a vocabulary in a process that requires a lot of reasoning. In your reading and listening, you are endlessly making inferences about different shades of meaning and the different contexts in which words are used. A somewhat similar point might be made about the Information subtest (which many people also view as unrelated to intelligence). You acquire a fund of information not by absorbing data in isolation but by noting the connections between different data. Both Vocabulary and Information correlate about 0.80 with overall IQ…
this picture is GAY.
But it would make a good IQ test..making sense of it
retarded hispanic
Is that Tarn Adams??
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarn_Adams
Whoops, forgot to deduct points for old norms. Added an update to the post in bold.
This may be a basic question but please clarify for me Mr. Person:
If an adult takes an IQ test on a test with old norms, does Flynn Effect still affect his scores? Since Flynn Effect on test scores takes place after he’s reached adulthood, his own personal intellectual development isn’t impacted by FE. Right?
An IQ of 100 by definition means you scored like the average (white) American of your age and birth cohort. But if you take a test that was normed a decade ago, you’re being compared to a previous cohort. Since previous cohorts scored lower than your cohort, getting a score that is average (IQ 100) for the previous cohort, is actually below average compared to your cohort.
OH!! Okay thanks.
DUH.
what an r-tard…
IQ 120???
more like IQ 12.
Haha, I realized it was a dumb question as soon as Pumpkin explained it.
stupid people don’t know they’re stupid.
Like you. You still think that environmental interventions can raise IQ? All evidence says otherwise
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500135X
The hereditarians are top in IQ research now.
Of course they’re in fucking top. Just now people are realizing that its the genes that allow for civilization, not “culture” or “environment”
Guess what Galton was saying all those centuries ago. Heredity wins always.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1683/20150015.long
dumb fuck…
http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/iej/articles/v2n4/GUSTAF/PAPER.PDF
But I guess it doesn’t matter. Give it some time, and we’ll be engineering super-geniuses with CRISPR. Hsu’s dream is about to come true soon, and more likely in China than the West.
I guess that’s the only way we can defeat heredity. Find all the genes for intelligence, we have several replicated SNPs already, and splice up paying customers’ foetuses.
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.ca/2015/11/genetic-story-jumps-ahead.html
too bad the flynn effect is reversing in german countries. it will probably be as bad as the image above implies.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615001336
d0000000d
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1992-12228-001
Haha, I realized it was a dumb question as soon as Pumpkin explained it.
LOL! It wasn’t really a dumb question at all,since it’s an issue that is widely misunderstood even by academics studying the field. For example, Richard Lynn’s wikipedia page contains the following criticism of him for adjusting scores for old norms:
Corrections were applied to adjust for differences in IQ cohorts (the “Flynn” effect) on the assumption that the same correction could be applied internationally, without regard to the cultural or economic development level of the country involved. While there appears to be rather little evidence on cohort effect upon IQ across the developing countries, one study in Kenya (Daley, Whaley, Sigman, Espinosa, & Neumann, 2003) shows a substantially larger cohort effect than is reported for developed countries (p.?)[62]
Wikipedia & whoever they’re citing, do not understand that the rate of Flynn effect in different countries was irrelevant, because Lynn was calculating all IQs with reference to Western white norms at the time of the testing, so regardless of whether he was testing Americans or Somalians, IQs earned on tests normed on Western whites had to be reduced based on the Flynn effect in Western whites if those norms were old.
It’s obvious what vocabulary is, but what is ‘information’? What kind of questions are information question?
Vocabulary and digit retention seem to be related in that you would need to be good at memorizing stuff to have a good vocabulary or else you would forget new words soon after coming across them.
The reason it correlates so powerfully with IQ is that you build a vocabulary in a process that requires a lot of reasoning. In your reading and listening, you are endlessly making inferences about different shades of meaning and the different contexts in which words are used.
I think it has more to do with memorization than inferences and reasoning, unless the test gives you some context and asks you to infer the meaning of the word from it. The SAT doesn’t do that and you have to know the definitions beforehand.
??? SAT Reading comprehension requires inference and gives context. The fill in the blank part does too…
My problem with vocabulary tests, and why I’m surprised they correlate so highly with g, is that it’s pretty easy to memorize vocab lists and score artificially high. I studied a lot of Latin roots and vocab for the SAT Verbal, which is why I probably I got 800 on that test (and I got 19/19 on WAIS Vocab).
My problem with vocabulary tests, and why I’m surprised they correlate so highly with g, is that it’s pretty easy to memorize vocab lists and score artificially high. I studied a lot of Latin roots and vocab for the SAT Verbal, which is why I probably I got 800 on that test (and I got 19/19 on WAIS Vocab).
A skill might be easy to improve with memorizing, but if very few people bother doing so, it can remain very g loaded in the general population.
As for your high vocabulary…the fact that you also got a scaled score of 19 on the WAIS-IV Information subtest (another measure of acquired knowledge) suggests it wasn’t so much the memorization you did, but an innate capacity to absorb verbal information
it means general knowledge, u retard.
Hey, stop being such a meanie.
Reginald Cholmondeley
wut is dat?
I told certain readers that I would be estimating the IQ of various people, such as Clark Ashton Smith and Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov..and I will do so, but more research is needed. For now, a simple post about teachers.
It has long been believed that school teachers are good judges of the intelligence of their students, especially if you averaged the IQ estimate made by every teacher you ever had.
Because the heritability of intelligence is thought to double from childhood to adulthood, the older I got, the smarter my teachers thought I was, with a few major exceptions.
In nursery school my teachers probably thought I was dumb because I was a major behavior problem. I would scream and yell when forced to attend school, and once there, would be sent to the corner. The other four year olds asked why I was sent there and I would scream at them not to talk about me. As a result it was recommended that I not attend a French immersion school, and was confined to monolingual education.
In the sixth grade, my teacher took me aside and said something like “the bad news is you’re failing…the good news is, I thinker you’re brighter than 90% of the class.” For some strange reason, he thought I was the best writer he had ever seen, and told the class he wished he could write as well as me. I probably was a good writer for an 11-year-old, but did not progress much since then, partly because I seldom read anything other than blogs. One day when all the students left the class he predicted “One day you’re going to return to this school and say to me, I’m a lot more successful than you are, and far more people know who I am than know who you are, but thank you for believing in me.”
Despite this praise, this teacher became unhinged when I joined the chess team and became the #1 chess player in the entire school, because he felt chess was such a prestigious game that only good students should be on the chess team, let alone number one. I didn’t deserve the title but refused to give it up. When better chess players challenged me, I would mysteriously vanish, or I would drag the game out so long that the lunch break would be over before they could defeat me. However when I represented our school in chess tournaments against other schools, my luck would run out.
In the 9th grade my English teacher worshiped the ground I walked on, giving me not only 100% on assignments, but in one case OVER 100% on a book report for George Orwell’s 1984 which I didn’t even read. However my science teacher thought I was stupid. Making matters worse, there were special resource classes where students could get extra help. I didn’t need any extra help so I stopped attending, causing harassment from one of my classmates who thought I had become uppity. One day this classmate confronted me in science class asking if I thought I was better than the resource students. This lead to a massive physical confrontation in the science class, and the resource teacher, who had went around the school praising both the other boy and I, was furious at both of us for damaging her reputation as a judge of character. I decided to change schools.
At the next school there was a female principal who told me I was one of the cleverest boys she had ever seen. She had probably seen thousands and thousands of boys in her long career, so she probably thought I was a one in a thousand intellect (IQ 147). My English teacher at this school told me I could really go places, and my chemistry teacher told me that intelligence is the ability to adapt.
The next year I went to an alternative high school filled with misfits and ne‘er–do–wells. I became best friends with a very black student with a tested IQ of only 70 and everywhere we went, store clerks would follow him around like he was a criminal. When we went to Subway, a clerk told him to smile for the camera before he robbed the place. I saw firsthand how real racism could be, but he also brought it on himself, changing his subway order so many times he was banned from going there.
At this alternative school, I had an English teacher who I immediately realized what a white-East Asian hybrid and she confirmed to me that she was. She was incredibly bright, even inventing a new word: etiquettical, which means related to good etiquette. She was wise: when a classmate and I got into a heated debate over which direction North was, she said, “not all battles are worth going to war over.” It’s a lesson I never forget.
“You’re bright!” she told me. “You’re VERY BRIGHT! But you’re not brilliant, you know.” I asked her how she knew whether I was bright, very bright or brilliant, and she said she could tell from the way I write. Although the only writing she had seen of mine was a short story inspired by a provocative Picture Arangement item on the ancient Wechsler–Bellevue Intelligence Scale.
The following year I attended yet another school where all the most brilliant and most stupid students in the school board were sent. My law teacher was a raging antisemite who would rant everyday about how much he hated Jewish humor. He hated me too. When I would make a point he said “No! FUCK!!!!” but whenever his favorite student (who had a freakishly huge head measured at 24.5 inches) would make a point he would yell “HELLO! THIS KIND OF THING MAKES SENSE!!!”
There was another girl in the class he hated too and she got into a heated debate with him over what a yellow traffic light means. She was saying it meant “slow down” while he insisted it meant “stop if you can do so safely.” Finally he turned to her and said “would you quit telling me the law you uneducated bitch.”
There was another student in the class who looked a bit gay, and everyday the law teacher would say to this student “My God you look gay, today”
Later my girlfriend at the time stopped attending the class because he had said terrible things about several students behind their back including me. What had he said, I wanted to know. She wouldn’t tell me.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said.
But I kept pestering her. “HE SAID YOU’RE A FUCKING IDIOT WHO SHOULDN’T BE IN HIS CLASS,” she finally screamed. “NOW DID YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW THAT????!!!!”
It was hard to hear, but it’s good to know what people really think about you. For some mysterious reason, antisemites tend to think I’m stupid.
That’s my life story. Get your own 🙂