# Reliable online IQ tests



## anon1234 (May 15, 2013)

I wanted to know if anyone has found an online IQ test that isn't a joke. If you know of one, a link to it would be appreciated as well as any observed biases in the test.


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## SpiralHacker (Jan 19, 2010)

Mensa Home Test: https://www.us.mensa.org/join/mht/

I forget if you get a score but it will help determine if your score is high.


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## Json221 (Aug 9, 2013)

Could be wrong, but what I was taught in psych was that no IQ test is reliable past early childhood (ages 5-7ish) because then it starts testing knowledge and not intelligence. In fact, I believe IQ tests are meant to predict how well you'll do in school rather than how generally "intelligent" you are, and there are multiple theories of intelligence including ones about multiple intelligences (emotion, logical, natural, spatial, etc) and ones about general intelligences. 

Basically I'm trying to say that IQ tests are pretty worthless in my opinion. Besides, imagine if you score very low or very high. Are you going to live your life any differently? It wouldn't make sense to do so.


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## remmycool (Apr 10, 2013)

Json221 said:


> Could be wrong, but what I was taught in psych was that no IQ test is reliable past early childhood (ages 5-7ish) because then it starts testing knowledge and not intelligence. In fact, I believe IQ tests are meant to predict how well you'll do in school rather than how generally "intelligent" you are, and there are multiple theories of intelligence including ones about multiple intelligences (emotion, logical, natural, spatial, etc) and ones about general intelligences.
> 
> Basically I'm trying to say that IQ tests are pretty worthless in my opinion. Besides, imagine if you score very low or very high. Are you going to live your life any differently? It wouldn't make sense to do so.


I'm no expert, but I've read that the academic consensus is that multiple intelligences is feel-good crap. Most of the intelligences are strongly correlated with each other, which indicates that they're all stemming from a single general intelligence, called g. IQ tests attempt to measure g, but removing cultural and prior knowledge biases is easier said than done. Also, since we have no way of observing g directly, it's tough to tell how good new tests are at measuring it. All that said, modern IQ tests are orders of magnitude better than the old ones were, and they do a better job of predicting your academic/professional success than any other single factor.

The development of IQ tests kind of reminds me of the history of baseball stats. For a long time, people ignored numbers altogether. Then they picked some really bad ones (like RBIs and Wins) and grossly overvalued them. Now we have extraordinarily sophisticated stats available, but most people don't understand them because A) the old ones were so bad, b) learning is hard and C) who the hell cares? I took a class that covered IQ tests in some depth. I can't remember the name of the class or anything else about it, but I did find the IQ stuff interesting.

As for your second paragraph, a lot of people would say the same thing about MBTI. Just because you don't see value in something doesn't mean no one does.


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## Json221 (Aug 9, 2013)

I mentioned general intelligence (g) right after multiple intelligence (though I made it plural by accident). Anyway, my intuition tells me that it's extremely hard to separate knowledge from intelligence past middle school. An "intelligent" person might not necessarily know how to do derivatives or solve a certain type of puzzle they've never seen before. I'm guessing most adult IQ tests rely on the participant having not seen these types of problems, or making the problems about very easy to test skill like association and prediction. I can't imagine how these would be accurate to less than +- 10 IQ points, which is about 1 standard deviation for the population's IQ. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

MBTI has actual practical use and it's consistently used in the business world. I have experience with this. IQs, on the other hand, are essential tests that predict how you'll do in life, but mostly school (the rest tend to correlate) (from wikipedia: "IQ scores are used as predictors of educational achievement, special needs, job performance and income". The way I can objectively say one is more useful than the other is by stating that Myers-Briggs can be a great tool for understanding and working with other people, while IQ is only useful for introspection - and not very useful at that, considering success is much easier to attain via hard work than raw talent.


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