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<p>But why is differentiation above that level necessary? I hit the ceiling on the Woodcock-Johnson and Stanford-Binet back when I took them in first grade, and there was never a need to pursue additional testing - while clean and orderly rankings of intelligence are nice, they don’t seem to have a meaningful impact on how someone is taught or what services are provided to them.</p>
<p>IQ has no relation to doing well at school at all. We had an AP scholar dinner and I think only 3 people were gifted. Majority was not gifted.</p>
<p>I failed the gifted test each year my parents forced me to take it. and i didn’t like purposely blow it off or anything… i just don’t get those little picture things… -__-"</p>
<p>^ Sniperseas-- I suggest if you have the time to read Ellen Winner’s “The Gifted Child”. Prof Winner is married to Howard Gardner and they work together on projects at the Harvard School of Education. She has written eloquently on the distinction between profoundly gifted (and the percentages of suicides, drug addicts and other mental illnesses) as compared to moderately (so called “golden”) gifted. </p>
<p>The reason for the differentiation is not because of bragging rights, it is because they are an “at risk” population. They have significantly reduced self-esteem, they are much less likely to hold steady employment, possess a sense of isolation and other social maladies. Indeed, it is unlikely that a large percentage of such people would be able to attend Harvard, often they don’t make it through college–dropping out either then or even in high school unless they get appropriate counseling.</p>
<p>@m_c The OP’s point exactly. Also, dumb people don’t think about things, they react, mindlessly.</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen, I’d say the IQ distribution is right-skewed with a mean of 120.</p>
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<p>I am aware of what you are talking about, but this is really a distortion/misinterpretation of the studies of the “profoundly gifted.” First of all, most often they encounter dips in school performance at college, not before. The notion that most of them aren’t doing well at school because of emotional issues is wrong. They may be prone to spectacular flameouts at various points in their career. Some of this is due to not fitting in, not getting what they needed in school, etc. Whether or not mental illness in itself (rather than situational depression) is associated with this extreme intelligence is up for debate.</p>
<p>To cast my own theory, I think the fact that Harvard has more “golden gifted” (lower IQ) rather than “profoundly gifted” is because the admissions office is populated by people in the “golden gifted” group–not because of any psychological problems on the part of the profoundly gifted.</p>
<p>If you believe people with higher IQs tend to make better grades than others, that is not necessarily true. A kid from my school has a verified IQ of 183, which is incredibly high and very uncommon, but he was held back last year and just recently dropped out. Honestly, he was probably the smartest person I know of because of how easily he understands some concepts and how easily he retains them. I also once read that Albert Einstein was a poor student and only made exceptional grades in mathematics. I it find fascinating to be one of the most brilliant scientists of all-time, yet with poor academic skills. I have a verified IQ of 155, but I don’t think of myself as a genius or in anyway more superior than others because IQ is a flawed way of measuring intelligence. My GPA is not a perfect 4.0 and I’m not ranked first in my class, but I’m certain that I’m brighter than many people ranked very high in my class.</p>
<p>I remember how once at the beginning of this school year, our honors history teacher gave us a test to see how intelligent we were. The test consisted of around 100 questions that tested reasoning, spatial intelligence, etc., and we had an hour to complete it. While a lot of problems were easy, some absolutely stumped me and I had no clue how to even begin solving them. I scored higher than almost everyone in that class, and only my good friend (who has a GPA of 2.7) surpassed me by about five questions. The kid that is rank one in my class scored somewhere in the median of that test, which I find ironic since he openly considers himself a genius. </p>
<p>I don’t know the average IQ of Harvard students, and that shouldn’t even matter to anyone. Some Harvard students are there solely because they were able to maintain the required GPA and manage their spare time wisely, while some other Harvard students are truly brilliant and might just be the next big thing in wherever their passion lies.</p>
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<p>Well, things were a bit different in the 1880’s, so that obscures the matter. For example, the emphasis in math was on memorizing algorithms rather than problem solving. </p>
<p>Also, some math/science people seem to not to care for english.</p>
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<p>Did you try to get an “A” in every class? I made a decision that I wasn’t going to get any "B"s in high school. There’s always going to be a subsection of every intelligence level who don’t apply themselves in class, for various reasons. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t agree with or don’t want to do to get the “A”, particularly in english and the social sciences. There are always going to be a subset of people that underperform because they either don’t like academics or because they don’t agree with what the class is asking them to do.</p>
<p>And I agree that the IQ test is limited in what it tests…I was using it as a proxy for intelligence. There was a genius IQ person who writes “a dear so-and-so” column for the New York Times–I’d bet that this person isn’t on par intelligence-wise with the great innovators of our time.</p>
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<p>Impossible for any currently normed, validated test. (In other words, what was the name of the test that yielded this unvalidated score?) </p>
<p>A link to Einstein’s remembrance of his childhood education: </p>
<p><a href=“http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html[/url]”>http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html</a></p>
<p>Also, the estimates of the IQs of historical figures are highly suspect. Feynman had an IQ of 122–he was probably one of the top 5 physicists in the 20th century. I doubt Einstein would have gotten 190 on the IQ as is reported, even if the ceiling did go that high.</p>
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<p>This is very interesting, one with 155 thinks another with 183 is smarter. How does a 130 think of a 150, a 100 vs 130, and a 100 vs a 70 or 50? People in the norm don’t think too much about people in the tails left or right I presume.</p>
<p>@tokenadult
I don’t see how it’s impossible to score a 183 on an IQ test. Though scoring that high is very rare, it’s very possible. The highest known score in the world is 250 from a child prodigy, so I don’t see how it’s impossible. I also don’t talk to this person much so I don’t know what the test was called.</p>
<p>@lake42ks
I don’t think it really matters how someone with a lower IQ thinks of another with a higher IQ, because those tests aren’t very reliable. A person with an IQ of 130 shouldn’t say they are less intelligent than me, because they may actually be very bright and may have just not scored as high as they could on that test. My cousin had a friend in junior high that had an IQ of 110 (just a little above the average IQ) and he was able to go straight to college after 8th grade.</p>
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<p>Well, you can score 183 on the IQ test, but that score isn’t verified to mean anything more in terms of intelligence than the “ceiling” of the test.</p>
<p>Originially, the IQ score was supposed to correspond to the “mental age” multiplied by 10 of a 10-year-old taking the test. So a 110 score by a 10-year-old would indicate that they are mentally 11-years-old, and are capable of doing things intellectually at the level of an 11-year-old. A score of 140 by a 10-year-old would indicate they are at the level of a 14-year-old intellectually. However, at a certain point (the ceiling) the score is not verified to mean that the kid can perform at the corresponding level the score suggests. I think the ceiling for the Stanford-Binet test is 150, so if a 10-year-old got 180 that would not mean they were at the level intellectually of an 18-year-old. (The Stanford-Binet is generally the IQ test given.)</p>
<p>I think there was an effort to raise the ceiling of the test such that higher scores were meaningful, but I’m not sure about the details of that.</p>
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<p>That test was not scored according to its scoring manual, for sure. For a while, there was a paragraph in some of the Wikipedia articles about some of the people who are claimed to have super-high IQs that clarified that issue, although facts come and go from Wikipedia articles, depending on how well volunteer editors check reliable sources. The reliable source on this issue is first of all Measuring Intelligence by Lewis Terman and Maude Merrill (1937), and more recently IQ Testing 101 by Alan S. Kaufman and IQ and Human Intelligence second edition (2011) by N. J. Mackintosh. Let me say it categorically: there is no such thing as an IQ score above 160 that can possibly be taken as a reliable, validated estimate of “general intelligence” from any recently normed, properly validated test. Not one, not any.</p>
<p>And, one more time (I’ve said this before in this thread, at [post</a> #138](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13708520-post238.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13708520-post238.html)) the Stanford-Binet Form L-M test (which I took in childhood) has been obsolete at least since when it was reviewed in the Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook with the phrase “Requiescat in pace” in 1970. There has been a minor revision and two more major versions of the Stanford-Binet published since then, but meanwhile the WISC, which has also gone through new versions, is the “gold standard” for child IQ testing in the English-speaking world.</p>
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<p>Sent from my iPhone 4 using CC app</p>