Are the online ones legitimate?
Is the entire concept of measuring intelligence flawed?
Exactly how unbiased is the IQ Test?
Does it depend on different stages of one's life.
After you've graduated college it might measure 157!
After the very same person joins a cult, they might test lower.
So what exactly is being measured?IQ tests have one major flaw above all ... caclutated it is (mental age/chronological age) * 100. This in inherently flawed. Your test is going to be somewhat standard mattering on the exact test you take. Where the flaw comes in is the chronological age. Technically speaking if you take an IQ test twice once when you are 20 and again while you are 30 and you test the same on it (lets say 1000 for a mental age score) when you take the test @ 20 your IQ is 5000 -- which isn't possible, but bear with me -- when you take the test @30 your IQ is 3333 ... so basically what that is saying is you are technically getting dumber as you age.
If you saw not too long ago there was an infant inducted into Mensa (a society for high IQ people). To that I said: "no ****" If you think about it if the kid is 2 and he gets an IQ of 200 and gets inducted ... if you reverse the fomula 200/100 = 2 ... 2 = x / 2 ... x = 4 ... thus he scored enough points to score as a 4-old-old ... okay he must be smart, but if you think about it these are standardized tests -- questions with multiple choice answers. I could take random guesses and I would be able to get a score of a 4-year-old but my IQ would be 16 in that case. Thus the system is inherently flawed to benefit youth.
If you are tested at 20 and you have an IQ of 200 lets say ... that means you have a mental age of 40. Does this mean when you hit 40 your mental age will match your chronogical age? So your IQ will drop to 100 then? Or is your IQ constant thus you would have a mental age of 80? Is that a good thing? I mean at 80 dementia can start to set in there. I would think the brain of a 80 year old would not be as good as the brain of a 40 year old.
All in all you can't take a test to figure out how smart you are (which is what an IQ test is). I am a very intelligent person. I have taken the Mensa test and was denied membership. Personally I am the suckiest test taker you will ever see I have tutored people to As in classes that I got Cs in. It is just how I am. Having an actaul test in front of me isn't going to measure anything other than how well I take a test.
Also, my experience on the Mensa tests. You need some inherent knowledge of how things work and how things are. If you do not have them then you are handicapped. There was one picture question where it showed a marlin, a goldfish, a dolphin, and a trout and the question was "Which doesn't belong?" Right there you are at a disadvantage if you have never seen what a marlin, goldfish, dolphin, or trout looks like. Also there are more than one answer to this question. The correct one is a dolphin (it is a mammal and breathes air while the others are fish). I chose the goldfish because none of the others can be a realistic domesitacted pet. Was my answer wrong? No, in fact it was 100% correct and if i could explain my logic I would have gotten full credit for it. (One a side note: I was in meteorology class taking a test and a quesiton came up that was phrased: "Do you know the difference between" cloud X and cloud Y? I was the only one in the class to get full credit on it because I asnwered: No. Logically I was 100% right and the teacher saw that). But what if I lived in some Tibetten Monistery and my life was all in there. If I would look at those 4 pictures I might never have seen any of them before nor would I know that a dolphin is a mammal. It doesn't mean I am any less intelligent, it just means I am lacking a piece of knowledge that should not effect the score of a test that is supposed to measure my intelligence and logic. Sticking oddly shaped pegs into equally oddly shaped holes is a better measurement of intelligence and logic than showing me pictures of fish.
Overall it is a very flawed system that does not benefit anyone at all other than being able to stick their nose into a conversation and say "I am a genius" ... newsflash I am a genius too, I just don't test well and because you want to look at the score of a standardized test you will never know.IQ tests are all relative to age usually (developmentally) and they are all obviously subjective.
Much like the SAT, the only thing an IQ test measures is how good you are at taking an IQ test.Many of the IQ tests that are available online are variations of the Stanford-Binet IQ test developed in the late 1940s (I think).
They typically test such cognitive abilities as spatial relations, logical thinking, comparisons, and language skills. In the early 1980s many of these tests were taken to task for what was perceived to be a cultural bias in favor of white upper-middle-class questions.
I find that the tests that Mensa offers tend to be far more thorough than your average online IQ test.
In theory, your IQ remains the same throughout your entire life and is not dependent upon learning. I personally don't believe that this is the case. I took an IQ test when I was 12 and did very well. However, I did much better when I took a similar test right out of law school, after I had spent a good three years honing my logical reasoning skills.1. Yes, IQ tests are subjective. They are written by individuals, and the questions asked are highly arbitrary.
2. None of the online tests are legit. You have to go to a psychologist's office to take one of the legitimate IQ tests.
3. It's difficult to ascertain how unbiased IQ tests are. It's a matter of opinion.
4. Your IQ score depends on your age, but not in the way you seem to think it does. IQ scores for children are the IQs that that child is predicted to have as an adult. So if a 4 year-old gets a score of 140, that does not mean that that child has intelligence equal to an adult who also scores 140. It means that the child is PREDICTED to have a 140 IQ as an adult.
As I bet you can imagine, IQ testing children is none-too-accurate. A good number of those young kids you hear about with ridiculously high IQs (say, 160) grow up to have IQ scores much closer to normal because testing young children is just so inaccurate and also because sometimes kids don't reach their full potential for intelligence.
After you reach adulthood, nothing you do day-to-day can influence your IQ score very much. Your idea about your IQ rising a lot because you've graduated from college is inaccurate. It just doesn't work like that.