Over 589 people have now taken the TAVIS and these have a mean and standard deviation of 9.84 and 2.63 respectively.
When the sample increased to 604, I decided to rank the items by order of difficulty (hat-tip to Kiwi-Anon who suggested this could be easily done in Excel):
At least 48 TAVIS takers reported taking the Wechsler intelligence scales in the U.S. or Canada within the last 10 years (excluding people who reported scores outside the valid score range). This subgroup had a mean TAVIS score of 10.48 (SD = 2.44) and a mean self-reported Wechsler score of 129.92 (SD = 17.61). When I arranged the 48 TAVIS scores from lowest to highest and placed them beside the 48 Wechsler scores ranked lowest to highest, I got the following equivalencies.
TAVIS 7 = Wechsler IQ 100
TAVIS 8 = Wechsler IQ 105
TAVIS 9 = Wechsler IQ 121
TAVIS 10 = Wechsler IQ 125
TAVIS 11 = Wechsler IQ 141
TAVIS 12 = Wechsler IQ 146
TAVIS 13 = Wechsler IQ 151
TAVIS 14 = Wechsler IQ 154
TAVIS 18 = Wechsler IQ 159
Correlation between TAVIS and self-reported Wechsler IQ: +0.04
The correlation with the Wechsler was disappointingly low, but keep in mind that the Mega Test also had an incredibly low correlation with the self-reported Wechsler so this doesn’t necessarily invalidate the test.
Pumpkin Person 
I now know what PP stands for!
Pepe, can we post answers yet?
Up to Teff
Ya that’s cool
Ok, the test is closed. Go ahead & discuss.
My answers (not all of which I came up with while taking the test):
1. Up : Down :: Black : White
2. Hungry : Eat :: Thirsty : Drink
3. Square : 4 :: Triangle : 3
4. Washington : George :: Obama : Barack
5. Muffin Man : Drury Lane :: Santa Claus : North Pole
6. Peru : South America :: France : Europe
7. Plants : Herbivore :: Animals : Carnivore
8. Hearts : Cardiologist :: Children : Pediatrician
9. Charlie : Snoopy :: Dorothy : Toto
13. Spare parts : Exchangeable :: Currency : Fungible
14. Birds : V :: Bees : P hahahahahh
15. Anomaly : Aberration :: Ghost : Apparition
16. James : Giant Peach :: New York : Big Apple
18. Artistry : Oeuvre :: Polytheism : Pantheon
20. Hermes : Mercurial :: Cronus : Saturnine
22. Millennium : Decade :: Second : Jiffy
23. Poker pair : 78 :: Snake eyes : 1
Was looking for the seldom-used “centisecond” on 22. Kind of a trick question because many use “millisecond” when referring to 1/100 of a second. I would accept jiffy if scoring weren’t automatic.
Teffec told me in an e-mail that the answer to 2:35 : 132.5 : 5 o’clock : ? is 0 because it’s the number of degrees between the hour and minute hand, but wouldn’t that would be 150 degrees at 5 o’clock, since the hour hand is on 5 and the minute hand is on 12? I got the correct idea almost immediately, but thought I hadn’t because I forgot that the hour hand moves between 2:00 and 2:35.
Doh! You’re right. Invalid item. I changed the format of the second part so it was clear time was the idea and not an analogy within an analogy. Must have been thinking the clue was Noon when I sent the modified key to PP. Total lapse there
I believe the answer to the ghost one is poltergeist, the answer to the speedboat one is phelps, the answer to the lions one is calcium (since iron = fe = feline, calcium = ca = canine)
You might be able to justify poltergeist, but apparition is the more “obvious” logical answer. Speedboat one is (Usain) Bolt. Outstanding job on that last one.
Explain poker pair?
78 possible combinations can make a pair in poker (13 card values of 4 suits each). Only 1 combination of rolled dice makes snake eyes.
Lol, please tell me someone else answered the Muffin Man/Santa Claus question with ‘chimney’ in full confidence that it must have been the correct answer. Aside from being familiar with the appellation ‘Muffin Man’, I had no background knowledge. It stood to reason that the Muffin Man travels down ‘Drury Lane’ to deliver his wares, just as Santa travels down the chimney to deliver his.
Also, is the answer to birds/bees not ‘swarm’?
Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but I think the answer there is Birds : V :: Bees : P, as in the first letters of the female and male sex organs. To answer this, you need to know that “the birds and the bees” is a euphemism for sex, usually used when teaching children about it.
Why is the answer Usain Bolt? I was looking for a successful runner with the first name Michael to make it match with Michael Phelps.
Bolt is a racecar personified just as Phelps is a speedboat personified. Racecars and speedboats are the fastest land and water vehicles respectively just as Bolt and Phelps are the fastest land and water humans respectively. I thought that was one of the best items.
I suppose not all birds fly in a V. Yes, I think everyone is familiar with the birds and the bees. I am not particularly convinced the question so costructed is that useful.
I answered ‘hundredth’ on the millenium:decade ; second: ? question. This answer obviously warrants credit. Centisecond? Come on, man. No way that Q is valid. I would guess at least a few people answered ‘.01’
I’ll grant that constructing a rigorous verbal assessment is difficult and that your effort was fine.
I didn’t know Michael Phelps was the fastest swimmer. I thought he was just fast.
Oh right, I was confused about which part of the speedboat one was missing. Can you explain why apparition is the correct answer rather than poltergeist? Poltergeist seemed more obvious to me.
An aberration is an unwelcome anomaly, a poltergeist is an unwelcome ghost
Ya I didn’t think of an aberration as necessarily unwelcome, though the first entry in Oxford says that it usually is. Still was looking for the similar phonology like G said. You’re so erudite that you overthought that one!
Lol I guess I just tend to look first for semantic relationships before phonological/aesthetic ones, it’s why the lions tigers one confused me so much at first. Honestly I didn’t think that much about ‘poltergeist’ before I justified it here, it just seemed the most intuitive to me. A ghost is a mere supernatural anomaly but a poltergeist is an aberration – especially if you have expensive china! And in an odd way there is a kind of phonological relationship; ‘poltergeist’ and ‘aberration’ are more sonically violent to my ears than ‘ghost’ and ‘anomaly’.
apparition, aberration, very similar phonologically
What are the answers to Flame, Certified, and Human?
Yes but anomaly isn’t at all similar to ghost phonologically
I believe the answer to the Dr. Dre one is Biggie Smalls. Dr. Dre is a rapper, who’s certified as his name contains Doctor. Biggie Smalls is also a rapper, whose name is a contradiction or oxymoronic.
Very good. Probably not a great item because so few people got it right, but I wanted to include something that loaded a bit on “urban intelligence.” PP, is there a way for you to see which items were best at discriminating between low, moderate, and high scores? Might be more work than is warranted given the test’s mild g loading.
http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/hoeflin/megadata/bestitems.html
I probably don’t have time in the foreseeable future but it’s worth doing considering the huge amount of data we collected on your test. I can always send you the excel file if you want to look into such questions. Jensen wrote back in the 1970s that a standard part of test creation is an item response curve. Imagine the work to make a curve for every single test item and this was before the computer era! Psychometrics is such an impressive field in many ways.
oh I get it now lol, biggie smalls, good one
The correct answer to flame is winnow.
The correct answers to human are both cosmology and cosmogony for the reason I have written below.
I do not want to inundate the blog with superfluous messages. I want both seafloorfarmer and Ganzir to notice the correct answers and tell Ganzir the bizarre story of how I obtained the correct answer to Birds. I had assumed the answer had to be P because the second letter of aviary is V and the second letter of apiary is P. Aviary is the place where birds are kept. Apiary is the place where bees are kept. I had assumed that they were also the generic corresponding adjectives of their respective nouns akin to vulpine for foxes.
Very good! The “birds and the bees” crossed my mind when G laughed at my calling it esoteric. Apian and apiary aren’t commonly used. You have an excellent vocabulary.
Hol’ up: your intended logic was aviary/apiary? Really?
Excellent question if aviary/apiary was the key. Hilarious that the ‘birds and the bees’ angle yielded the correct answer as well. I came up with ‘swarm’ right away and didn’t consider the question further.
I am, I presume the only person with a 20 score on this test after many attempts. My score on my initial attempt was only “15”. I had all the requisite knowledge on my first attempt but was in a terrible mental state. Afterwards, I was bemused by the low score and adopted an experimental, incremental approach to increasing my score.
Life mimics art deliberately!
what happened to the third norming peepee?
That was the Old SAT norming:
https://pumpkinperson.com/2022/04/13/the-third-norming-of-the-tavis-old-sat/
Had many more responses to the kamikaze yet? Also curious to see if their is any relationship between age and tavis scores
The KAMIKAZE takes a lot more time & effort so fewer people take it. Of the people who have taken it, so far only 6 have self-reported Wechsler scores. But the good news is the correlation between KAMIKAZE & Wechsler so far is a potent 0.82
Wow! That’s a strong enough correlation to be statistically significant at p<0.05 even with n=6. Of course I don't expect it to stay that high as a 0.82 correlation is even higher than the correlation between Arithmetic and FSIQ on the WAIS, but definitely a good sign.
The K was a well-constructed test…
kiwianon, this may reflect poorly on my general knowledge, but what’s the animal in your avatar? It looks cool. Something native to New Zealand?
Just an opossum, ironically the only marsupial not endemic to Oceania
ironically you have AIDS. the 120+ species of so-called opossums in the western hemisphere look nothing like the virginia opossum, the only species of marsupial north of mexico.
Yep, it’s a Virginia Opossum. There are many other species of opossums found in the Americas but I believe that is the only one found in North America. In NZ we have arboreal marsupials introduced from Australia called “possums” too, but they are not closely related to the opossums in the Americas and do not look very similar to the Virginia Opossum (they are more similar looking to some of the species in South America). I’ve never encountered an American opossum in person, but I like them because they are quite evil looking when they bare their teeth but are actually supposed to be quite harmless. Their defense mechanism is basically to stand there looking like they are about to unleash a powerfully autistic screech (sometimes they make gurgling sounds, but alas, no screeches of the sort) and then play dead.
If I’ve ever seen one, it was dead on the highway
It’s quite unsurprising that they only live about 2 years in the wild. Live slow, get run over young
As of today, I am the only one with a 17 on the kamikaze in addition to a 20 on the tavis. I obtained the 17 today after many attempts. Link to the screenshot:https://ibb.co/YcxSJFV
Link to the screenshot of my penultimate score on the tavis:https://ibb.co/rfjSF9f
I didnt take a screenshot of my ultimate score on the tavis because I had thought that the test would remain open and I would further increase my score.
Well, your true scores on the kamikaze and the tavis are whatever you got on your first attempt. I’m pretty sure a few people would get 17 on the kamikaze with multiple attempts, I know of a few who solved the final hardest question after they had taken the test, though to my knowledge no one has solved it within the time limit on their first attempt.
It is strange that I haven’t clarified this before. I wrote 15 under quotation marks in one of the other comments on this thread, because 15 was not my true score. 15 was the score that the retarded scoring system returned and that was the source of my confusion. On my first attempt I wrote [redacted by pp, 2023-03-06]. In addition to that, 2 of my other supposedly incorrect answers were synonyms of the correct answers according to thesaurus.com. Thus, my true score on my first attempt was 18, not 15.
Pepe I just had the best idea related to I.Q. that I’ve ever had
So did I
I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours
This norming seem a lot more reasonable. Much more in line with my wisc-iii score.
any chance you could do a post on the Miller Analogies test? very similar to TAVIS
Maybe some day. I don’t know much about it. You’re welcome to submit a guest article.
may i submit a guest article about a math game i played as a kid? its a very fascinating story!
You can submit but because my standards are so high, there’s no guarantee it will be published.
okay i think it will be a good story though and ive been a long-time commenter on this blog i expect some leeway.
do i just email you what i want written and you read it and based on that criteria you make an assessment whether to post it?
just post in comment section under the heading guest post & if it’s acceptable, i”ll leave it in moderation but copy and paste it into a blog post.
hmm so a 9/27 now equates to an IQ of 121, from an IQ of 117 previously. Interesting indeed.
I don’t recall 9 ever equating to a score below 121 on the TAVIS
Huh? But it did. i think you forgot cuz you deleted the old articles. This is the fourth norming, I think it equated to a 117 on the third or second norming of it
I don’t think so but nothing was deleted so you can check for yourself.
if Pakistan is a shithole how i did i get a 10 on the TAVIS and you got a 9? dumb indian fuck.
you damned Hindu Indian freak!
just posted my guest post under the comment section Pumpkin feel free to write it as an article if you think its worthy of being published like i think it is!
Got. I’ll review it & decide
lemme know when a decision is made are you approving or disapproving of it?
it’s been published
Wait a minute, William Owlson is the same guy as LOADED? I never would’ve guessed
That should have been obvious
OT
I recently took the WAIS and was shocked by the lopsided scores on subtests. For example, I scored 99th percentile on Vocabulary and an abysmal 25th percentile in Arithmetic. Has anyone here ever received subtest score differences like this? I have a brother with ASD (basically Aspergers) and wonder if there is something strange going on with the cognitive profiles in the family.
Of course I may just be a blithering idiot with numbers.
A friend of mine is severely dyscalculic, but he’s the only person in my personal life whose tested vocabulary rivals my own. His brother is on the spectrum and got perfect scores on the SAT and ACT. I honestly think I could have hit the ceilings of the arithmetic and block design subtests at 11 years old, maybe because I’m borderline aspie.
what were the answers to human and flame?
winnow and cosmology
i like your username!
I apologize for the belated response. I, in fact, despise this username. It was part of an abandoned parody attempt and was meant to ridicule the paucity of genuine erudition among the online psychometrics afficionado community.
The answer to flame is winnow
The answer to human is cosmology/cosmogony
no cosmology is the study of origin of the universe
Both are correct answers since genealogy is a polysemic word. It can also mean : an account of the descent of a person, family, or group from an ancestor or from older forms.
It’s the contrary PP. Cosmogony deals with the origin (“gon” is like “generate”) and cosmology study the laws of the universe.
I tried to find rappers with names in form of oxymoron but there is no way I would have known about Biggie Smalls. The name isn’t necessarily contradictory and it would be used like antonym 1 Biggie and several Smalls like a lead artist and it’s band I guess. Or three different objects, 1 big and 2 smalls … wich is not contradictory either even if there may be a correlation 😂
There was a typo on the human question. It was supposed to be “Word,” not “World.” Winnow is correct.
wow that’s quite different haha. sounds like the answer was etymology if I remember the question correctly.
Etymology is the correct answer to that alternative question. It took me approximately 4 seconds to obtain the answer.
Etymology 😂
Btw I had winnow and Bolt
Etymology
That question did not seem quite right. I answered either geology or history to the faulty, ‘world’ version. Etymology would have been a cinch.
So, 1 in 600 (IIRC, that’d be one overall) test-takers misread ‘world’ as ‘word’.
i hate the state i live in! Massachusetts is such an inbred shithole!
lmao you’re literally a Pakistani that’s a real inbred shithole
youre a faggot. arent you indian? thats even worse!
if you really believe your IQ is above a hundred your delusions might have gotten the better of you bitch.
i didnt grow up there though!
i mean i didnt grow up in Massachusetts i would proudly have rather grown up in Pakistan than this shithole of a state!
@akatsukireddawn indians are literal walking pieces of shit.
Are you religious or not?
no
So as 23 and 23 were mistaken, the most difficult legit items selected 3% and both items were very « culture loaded » , one vocabulary, the other artistry.
Got bored and constructed another analogy. I’d estimate a 30 to 50 percent success rate for people who attempted the TAVIS. If I have in fact constructed a sound item.
Hypothesis : Explanation ; Quote : ?
Citation
got it in 3 seconds
That answer has phonological appeal. And I believe I’ve made progress in discerning the logic of choosing it. But it’s not what I had in mind.
A hypothesis is a possible explanation, a quote is a possible price
It is (again, if sound to begin with) a very hard question. 30 to 50 percent was too high. Seems easier when you’re the one who came up with it.
Price. A hypothesis is a possible explanation, a quote is a possible price.
Price is the answer. Nicely done.
…and (obviously) on the basis of the justification you gave.
Interesting twist. In constructing the question, I defined ‘quote’ as an estimate (i.e., the working ‘explanation’) of the cost of a service, subject to revision in light of a more thorough inquiry into the required labor (i.e., the experiment testing the ‘hypothesis’). As it turns out, ‘quote’ is actually a hard price offer. The analogy still works, but the bargaining process between seller and buyer does not work particularly well as an analogue to an experiment.
Kiwianon and smw, can you solve this?
haunted:Paris::wrenched:?
I’ve got nothing on that one. Seems to draw on cultural knowledge. Is Paris notable for its haunted attractions?
The answer is Pauls cathedral in London. It is dependent on knowledge and extremely recondite. It is also similar to the felineferrumcaninecalcium question on teffec test. The first three letters of haunted are the first three letters of Haussman. Hausmann is famous for reconstructing Paris. Wren is famous for reconstructing Londons cathedral after the 1666 conflagration.
Definitely wouldn’t have got that one
Clever but yes, quite esoteric. That haunted attractions comment (I made) didn’t make too much sense. Here’s a fairly rigorous item I just constructed. Not sure I would get it if I wasn’t the author lolol
midget : hand ; wrong : ?
I can’t think of anything other than ‘teeth’ – ‘midget’ and ‘hand’ makes me think of the term shorthand, and false is the only synonym of wrong that I can think of as being associated with a body part, namely teeth. But this is clearly a stretch and does not produce a unique answer (you could also have ‘lashes’ or ‘knee’ by the same logic). So it seems this one is a bit too hard for me.
There is a pretty significant ‘red herring’ initial approach to this question. Just based on the complete analogy on the left.
It’s pretty rigorous. Definitely outside the box. I would very likely not get the answer were I not the author.
Answer is ‘fork’.
Digit rhymes with midget. Digits are the appendages/protuberances of a hand. Prong rhymes with wrong, and prongs are the appendages/protuberances of a fork.
So, ‘estimate’ should have taken the place of ‘quote’.
Hey PP. Could I see both the questions and the answers to the TAVIS test?
It should be available in a couple weeks