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The intelligence quotient is surrounded by mystery and controversy, but most people would love to say that they have a high IQ.
What does it take to be called a genius? What sorts of things are tested? Who has the highest IQ?
Find out by listening to the CultureCast above (by pressing the little blue play botton), or by clicking through and checking out the transcript and further sources.
Intelligence Quotient (CultureCast #045)
(To play the audio directly in this page, click the little blue play button. To download the file, right click the text link and choose “Save Link As…”)
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Transcript
Hey CultureCats, this is Joshua Hwang affirming your intelligence with another 90 Seconds to Culture podcast.
Intelligence Quotient
The intelligence quotient or IQ is a number that comes from standardized tests used to measure intelligence. Early IQ tests, measured a person’s ability as a ratio or quotient of a theoretical average person. If you scored the same as this “average” person, your score would be divided by theirs and multiplied by 100; in this case giving you an IQ of 100. If you did twice as well, you would have an IQ of 200.
These days the average IQ is still set at 100, but scoring is no longer a true quotient (it doesn’t involve simple division), but is plotted on a Gaussian bell curve.
Depending on whom you ask, a “genius” IQ can range quite a bit. The high-IQ society MENSA allows members who score in the top 2%, roughly 135 or greater.
Pop quiz time! The same word can be added to the end of GRASS and the beginning of SCAPE to form two other English words?
If you know the answer, then maybe you are MENSA material. The IQ tests other abstract thinking such as mathematical and geometrical pattern recognition, vocabulary games and logic puzzles.
Many, however, criticize the test as being biased against certain races or those of lower socio-economic classes. The person with the Guinness Record for highest IQ, Marilyn vos Savant, with a score of 228, readily acknowledges that IQ measures a variety of mental ability, but intelligence is made of so many facets that “attempts to measure it are useless”.
Sources / Further Reading:
Wikipedia: Intelligence Quotient
Wikipedia: Marilyn vos Savant - The woman known for the Guinness Record for Highest IQ
Wikipedia: Flynn Effect - IQs are increasing over time. Why?
Wikipedia: Genius
Mensa Workout - A test from the high IQ society, MENSA
[tags]intelligence, quotient, IQ, MENSA, genius, culture, podcast[/tags]
(image from radioflyer007 via Flickr)
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hey Josh,
Site looks sick though I demolished the MENSA IQ test with 29/30 (got the time question wrong because I wasn’t thinking properly) but there was one thing bothering me about that. Shouldn’t IQ tests be timed to provide a more accurate result. I thought that it was kind of weird how a “test” like that from MENSA wouldn’t at least be timed of some sort (MENSA’s reasoning was due to server response time and internet speeds but that wouldn’t factor in that much… maybe an extra 10 seconds between DSL and a 56K)
So I was just wondering if you had an alternative site that provides an accurate IQ since that test didn’t even give a result pertaining to IQ and all the free tests I find are quite inaccurate (mine all range from 144-180 which I highly doubt is accurate at all)