Today, my 11-year-old son and I took an IQ test for a laugh. To be honest, I've often suspected that I may have some form of mental retardation, but I didn't expect to get a score of 79, while he got one of 114. FML
Collection
Fall
Dead leaves, the first cold of the season and an umbrella flipped inside out: fall, the season of grace.
Today, I took a legitimate IQ test and got a score of 80. My parents both have IQ scores above Einstein’s. FML
Today, I took an online IQ test, even though I knew they give everyone unrealistically high scores. My score was 73. FML
Today, we got the IQ test results back, which show our daughter is on the high end of the genius scale. This confirms what my wife and I have long feared: our 6-year-old is FAR smarter than we are. No wonder she wins all the arguments we have. FML
Today, my husband, who is proud of his 155 IQ, is depressed our son is becoming a typical football jock with an IQ only just into the triple digits. He even thinks I must have had an affair, because no way could someone as smart as him have produced such a blockhead with tattoos. FML
Today, my dad took my son out of his will, so I confronted him. Turns out he has a new policy of “not rewarding dumb behaviour.” He’s willing to put him back in the will, if he ever scores over 120 on an IQ test. I love my son, but he’s a happy goldfish, 120 is just never happening. FML
Today, to settle a bet with a friend, I took an online IQ test twice. The first time, I chose answers at random without reading the questions. The second time, I took it for real. I got a higher score from the random selections than from my serious attempt. FML
Today, my son is smarter than average, almost genius level, and he has now reached an age where not only does he question me at every turn, he actually out-argues me 90% of the time and I can’t do anything about it because technically he’s right and I’m wrong. FML
Today, my 50-year-old dad was in a foul mood after taking an online test that put him in Slytherin house instead of Ravenclaw where he "belongs" because he's "so smart". FML
Today, my mom was taking an online IQ test. To the question "On which continent is Canada located?" she responded "Antarctica." If intelligence is genetic, I'm screwed. FML
Today, I asked my father if it was okay for me to take an ADHD test. He spent about 30 minutes yelling at as to why that is a dumb idea. I have asked multiple people who know me better than anyone else and they believe that I might have ADHD. FML
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Top comments
ArgentumAurum 24
Well you should be proud that you have a smart child.
RBntM 10
At least your son is smart
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Comments (165)
kenoswild 14
Don't worry. You have good English skills which tells me that you are smart enough to live by. Don't be too concerned.
BoltTheSuperdog 22
I'd rather score a 69 than a 79. Anyone? No? Ok...
yadeeliz 11
Your grammar is great so I doubt that you actually have a form of retardation.
dragonrider1959 18
Well then. You might have to turn the family pants cause it looks like he's wearing them now!
inolongercare 19
IQ tests are designed for 10 year olds.
jetsfan204 4
Give him a chance to catch up using all the drugs an alcohol and I'm sure you pride and hoy will burn out like the rest of yes / you need to slow down 79= huge brian loss
Ki11erC 18
If it was online it's 100% bs.
theasian007 11
Both are pretty low scores... Mine is 158...
mannatee 19
Suuuuure it is.
buckdharma 38
If you were on Family Feud, he would have done his part while you blew the $20,000.
Frungy 9
Okay, here's your friendly neighbourhood board certified clinical psychologist to clear up some misconceptions (somewhat sarcastically - which is not only allowed, but required because I'm European: 1. An IQ test doesn't measure intelligence. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is that no-one can agree on what "intelligence" really is. As a result the bunch of professors who designed the first one decided to set the benchmark as education. The IQ test therefore measures your likely final level of education, so someone who gets 140 should be able to finish their doctorate, while someone who gets 70 may have a lot of trouble finishing junior high school. Of course as bachelors' degrees became more common and Universities started handing out masters degrees to anyone who could spell their name right (best out of three tries!) this standard became more and more ridiculous. As a result the validity of IQ tests has been questioned as the thing they're benchmarked against (final educational level) has become less and less valid as a measurement of anything except patience and how much you're prepared to rack up in student loans. 2. No psychometric test (psychological test) is valid unless conducted by a qualified psychologist. Little stuff like sitting in a comfy chair in your house with the air conditioning on sipping a beer can make you more relaxed, which can up your score by about 10%... or sink it by about 50%, depending on how many beers you've sipped, downed or slammed. 3. Many of the commentators here are correct in pointing out that age is important. IQ tests were designed to test children. If you're not a child they're not valid, because you don't think like a child. 4. Psychometric tests are a massive pain in the teeth to design and validate (make sure they're measuring the right thing). Here's a quick overview of the process. You get about 100 000 10 year-old kids and pay them to take the test, which is really long and about 1000 questions long. Then you wait 20 years and see how many of these kids you can find again, normally it is about half if you're lucky, and you see what level of education they have achieved. You then run the questions through a lot of very complex statistics (that may or may not involve a dartboard, a bottle of gin and a dozen very drunk research assistants), and you see which questions of that list of 1000 questions from the first test actually correlated with the final level of education. You cut out all the questions that are random statistical "noise", and then all the questions with weak correlations until you're left with about 200~300 questions that give you "patterns" of responses that correlate strongly with educational level (i.e. people who got doctorates mostly answered in pattern A, people who flunked out of junior high answered in pattern B, etc.). Now you have your test, right? No. Now you have to go back and check it again, because the language the test was written in may have changed over 20 years, and that can HEAVILY affect the way people answer. Fortunately this revalidation only involves about 50 000 kids and another 10 years of waiting, because you can "spot check" the first few levels in most cases. As a result real IQ tests are constantly being updated, cost a fortune to produce and definitely are NEVER offered online for free. You might find an older version (i.e. invalid version) online for free, because the license/copyright has expired, but mostly what you find are "stripped down" 50 or 100 question versions that mean less than nothing. Of course this all assumes that the psychologist designing and researching the test actually understands what they're doing, knows enough about statistics and has any ethics. Sadly this often isn't the case and particularly in the U.S. many states have no regulatory board for psychologists, so psychometric tests are banged out in an afternoon by psychologists who see $$$ signs and then sold to a public who have no idea what they're buying and trust that the Ph.D. next to the psychologist's name means they do... sadly ladies and gentlemen it doesn't always. For those who saw this wall of text and decided TL:DR, here's the skinny, "IQ tests predict your likely final level of education (kinda), and online IQ tests are worse than useless.".
mrhe3t 9
This was long, but I read it all... and while I have known about this for sometime now, you shed light on some info I never knew. It was fun reading it, thanks.
pensacolalady 10
Well said! You're 100% right!
salamander461 11
That was very informative and interesting. Thank you!
gw002m 6
Okay... I'm also a psychologist, and even though this thread is a few years old, I just have to reply to clear up some misconceptions about intelligence testing. Though, keep in mind that I am in the US, and there may be differences in the tests and testing procedures that we use. (1) Intelligence tests may have originally been developed to estimate potential educational attainment, but this has not been the case since the 1940's or so. IQ tests are really looking at facets of intelligence (and you're right that there is a lot of controversy about the true definitions of intelligence), to see how people can reason and problem solve in different situations. (2) There are other people who can administer psychological tests (e.g., psychometrists), but your point is well taken. Factors such as mood, tiredness, hunger, etc. can influence performance. Which is why psychologists don't make conclusions based on just one test, but look for larger trends in performance. (3) There are different tests (or different start/end points on the same tests) for various ages. All current tests compare test takers to normative samples their same age. It is absolutely, totally false to say that IQ tests are only valid for children or are only used for children. Age is important, yes, but mainly for test selection and administration purposes. There are other factors involved as well- for example, there is much more variability in what a first grader is expected to do than what an adult is expected to do. Subtle weaknesses may not be picked up when younger children are tested for this reason, while for adults, areas of strength become more normative as the person's peers 'catch up' (see: regression towards the mean). (4) Yes, the development and norming of psychological assessment measures is complicated and expensive (though no test has 50,000 people in their normative sample. None.). There's a reason that a single measure of intelligence (e.g., one of the Wechsler scales) costs practitioners about $2000. And development of measures is a business- it's not necessarily that tests become invalid over time, but rather that the company released a new edition of the test, or that they "re-normed" the test to make sure that test takers' performances are still being compared to what is expected for people their age. Occasionally, there are reasons to use older tests or tests with older normative samples, but for the most part, the IQ tests used in the USA are no more than 10-15 years old. (5) Absolutely every U.S. state has a professional licensing board that covers psychologists. "Psychologist" is a protected term and people without a license are breaking the law if they claim that they are one (with a few exceptions, such as school psychologists, who are able to call themselves school psychologists and are limited to practicing within the school setting). Your claim is absolutely false. And, if you are European as you mentioned, I don't know why you'd even pretend to have any knowledge of US licensing laws and governing agencies. Overall- there is a lot of misinformation about IQ tests out there. Including what was just spread by this other poster... as a neuropsychologist, it is frustrating to see, since then people come into my office and believe the lies that they have read or heard. The take-home message is that it is important to make sure your practitioner knows what they're doing. If you are in North America (i.e., USA or Canada) and need an evaluation for any reason, I encourage you to find a clinician who is board-certified in clinical neuropsychology, through ABCN.