<p>Mention your high IQ if you want to be seen as arrogant and insecure. Otherwise, let the grades, scores, essays and activities speak for themselves.</p>
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<p>That’s an interesting statistic. The data seems to be from a study in 1960’s. It would be interesting to see a current study, to see if the situation has changed with the rise of the number of PhD’s. </p>
<p>And yes, now that you put it that way I think it would be a good idea to advertise that my IQ is actually higher than that of 50% of the people who have completed a physics PhD. Don’t you think that would sound good?</p>
<p>I do not have the book “Wechsler’s Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence, 5th ed”, which seems to be the source of the 125, so I can’t say on what the score is based (though I probably try to find it after the application season is over). To adjust my previous opinion, a problem with using standardized university tests (GRE, for example) as a measure of IQ is that one can increase the score by short-term training, which surely does not increase the actual intelligence. GRE-based measures that seem to be used quite a lot presently are flawed, in my opinion, because of the training effect mentioned above, the verbal portion, and the fact of having to actually know stuff.</p>
<p>There seems to be some discussion about these score-to-IQ conversions at [Half</a> Sigma: What Harvard is selling](<a href=“http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/02/what_harvard_is.html]Half”>http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/02/what_harvard_is.html).</p>
<p>Hi, my situation is a bit weird. </p>
<p>I am applying to an Engineering PhD program (Harvard SEAS - Environmental track). My IQ is above 140, but I also suffer from dyscalculia (they are linked in women). I conceptualise Maths differently: I won my country mental arithmetic contest 8 years in a row, but I need more time to solve spatial and geometry problems and I get lost pretty much anywhere (libraries!). I can use coloured overlays and bigger fonts to read numbers almost normally. However, I was not allowed any arrangements by ETS and my GRE maths score is only 640.
Should I mention theses factors on my application? Would my IQ counterbalance the learning disability? </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>
No. If your IQ is at or around 130, you are in the neighborhood of average - who goes out of their way to put an average characteristic on their application. Even if you are considerably higher, all it does is invite a comparison to the rest of your application that is unlikely to be helpful.</p>
<p>Oh, and you asked earlier if, all else equal, a listed IQ would make a hypothetical researcher more likely to choose you. I would say no. First of all, lacking the IQ of the other person, it is hard to make a comparison on this. Second, I can assume that the IQ of the other person is at least adequate, and if they have the same GPA and GRE and LOR’s as you despite no being as smart then it means that they are presumably more dedicated and hard working than you to have done as much with less natural faculty. Plus I would prefer the less arrogant one.</p>
<p>Anyway, everyone has told you NO in big bold letters, and you are still unsuccessfully arguing for what you want to hear. Go ahead and put it on your app, then let us know how it works. In absolute seriousness, please let us know how this works out for you - if it works poorly you can save others from the same mistake, if it goes well you can share a boost with the rest of the MENSA set.</p>
<p>@Katanaji - in your case including your IQ may be a good idea. Not sure about this, but if you feel that your dyscalculia is artificially deflating your scores then you should certainly mention it as a cause. Having mentioned it, it would seem reasonable to indicate other reasons why this issue would not impede your ability to complete the degree - if you feel IQ is the best way of doing so, then go for it. You might be better off by noting other accomplishments (like the arithmetic contest) and by having one of your LOR’s address this, but it may be that IQ will help in this case.</p>
<p>Honestly, I do not think you are that bad off for admissions. Many professors are aware that certain learning disabilities (like dyslexia, for example) are correlated with a higher-than-average IQ, so given the presence of decent grades and LOR’s they will probably assume the correct answer.</p>
<p>
Quite the opposite if you are shooting for selective programs. Keep in mind that most people (at least nowadays) don’t get their degree from a top 20 program. Saying you are just above average for all PhDs might indicate that you are quite a bit below average for the selective programs.</p>
<p>That aside, IQ tests are just as coachable as other standardized tests. Especially the pattern recognition tests. Most people are stumped the first time they encounter a non-trivial continue-the-sequence problem. After doing 200 of these, they are routine. Visualizing the result of a paper-folding without props? Quite challenging at first but learnable through practice. Your vocabulary is a function of your education and social background rather than your intelligence, and your ability to do mental arithmetic and memorize a list of items depends mostly on how much you are using these skills every day.</p>
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<p>I realize this conversation has not been very constructive for some time now, but I just want to clarify that in most real-world statistic distributions average, often understood as the mean (I apologize if you did mean something other), actually means (this would be such a lousy pun I wouldn’t even try it) that more or less half of the samples are less than the mean.</p>
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<p>GPA’s are difficult to compare, because of vastly different grading principles in different departments, in different universities, and in different countries. I believe that’s one reason GRE is actually used, to provide some objective measurement. However, as I have been repeating over and over, the problem of QGRE is that it does not distinguish good and excellent at all. Verbal GRE, as we hopefully all agree, does not have very much to do with hard science success. Subject GRE, I admit, does test knowledge of ones major extensively, though only the breadth and not depth. Remaining parts of an application, recommendations, SOP and research experience are quite difficult to judge objectively, but provide less standardized and maybe more personal information about the applicant. </p>
<p>With the arguments provided in this thread I can understand why it is not viewed as essential information. I don’t agree, but at least I understand why many people do. </p>
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<p>Despite what you might think, I’m not actually stupid. Like I have said before, it has never been my plan to actually put the fact into my application. For a moment I was serious about finding out if my original plan (that is, not put the fact in) is good or not, lately I have been trying to understand why many people think the way they do, and try to explain why I think like I do. And since most of my arguments are still standing healthily, I see no reason to change my view.</p>
<p>And this just in:
</p>
<p>Does that mean, that because I took the test with absolutely no preparation whatsoever…well, I fear what the responses would be if I actually said that aloud. Still, it would be sweet if b@r!um was correct.</p>
<p>This conversation shows that even intelligent people can be foolish.</p>
<p>I don’t get if the OP realized that programs are not asking for IQ and including it would make you look foolish. Intelligent people can have poor common sense, don’t demonstrate that you do. They don’t care if you think it is an important criteria.</p>
<p>Among other skills is the ability to write succinctly.</p>
<p>Katanaji, if you wish to discuss further, you will be better served by making you own thread, I suspect.
Katanaji</p>
<p>BrownParent is extremely right. Intelligent people can be unbelievably foolish and childish. They/we always believe they/we are right, and defend an opinion to a ridiculous extent, if required.</p>
<p>For the record: Yes, I have realized including IQ, no matter how high, is a bad idea. I’m sad about that, and not only for sake of my own chances. Nevertheless, I have accepted it and will not perform the said maneuver.</p>
<p>I guess by succinct writing you mostly meant my writing style (including using a lot of parentheses), which can at times cause sentences to be quite long, include many commas, and lose the main point the sentence started which, which can make them quite difficult to read. I really have never before seen the word “succinct”, so please correct me if I’m wrong. Good writing skills mean a great deal for me.</p>
<p>“Good writing skills mean a great deal for me.”</p>
<p>Then you might consider using the subjunctive mood.</p>
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<p>Good to know. I’m still trying to learn English; my native language does not have such things as subjunctive moods. Maybe I should get an elementary English book or something, to teach me proper language. Any suggestions?</p>
<p>Edit:
Since this is this thread, I’m not sure if that was an insult or not. Nevertheless, my response was serious and sincere.</p>
<p>
And therefore more or less half the samples are greater than the mean… which was my point. Tell me how this makes a good selling point - “Approximately half of all Physics PhD candidates are smarter than me.”</p>
<p>
I do not see how they are “standing healthily” - your arguments (as I have observed) are that (a) IQ is a good predictor of graduate school success, (b) high IQ is a good differentiator between otherwise comparable graduate applicants, and (c) a 98% percentile IQ score (which I interpret as ~130 Stanford-Binet) represents a high enough IQ to be worthy of note when applying to graduate school.</p>
<p>(a) I do not know that there has been any explicit study done to show that high intelligence is more important than anything else in graduate study. If anything, my experience (and I think most of the other respondents) favors those with dedication, discipline, and passion. Your argument is based on what you believe should be true, but you are able to support it neither with empirical evidence nor consensus of opinion. Also, although it was only done for school children, consider:
</p>
<p>(b) Again, there is a lack of research to support this, but I would note that I have never heard of any graduate program asking for IQ even as optional information. I suspect that if any schools thought it had worth that they would have mentioned its value. Further, when dealing with otherwise identical applications, a presumably higher IQ must necessarily accompany some other presumably lower characteristic to keep the two applications comparable. Would a professor prefer a less-dedicated, less-focused, slightly more talented student, or would they prefer someone who is at least adequately intelligent and possesses more discipline? I would be surprised to hear a professor pick the former.</p>
<p>(c) Most IQ scales have a standard deviation of ~15 points. Considering the score of an average PhD student at ~125, this just does not make a 130 IQ that impressive - it is well within a single standard deviation. Nearly half (or exactly half, if you are in physics) of the students will have a higher IQ. Optional information should always be exceptional, not something that says “hey, I’m probably a little better than average!”. Also consider (as someone noted) that this will vary between institutions - a top flight school may well consider a 130 IQ to be significantly substandard!</p>
<p>Anyway, in so far as we are dealing with a lack of concrete evidence and merely informed opinion, I would consider your arguments to be in poor shape right now.</p>
<p>Every language requires the ability to convey hypotheticals, possibility, wishes, etc. In Indo-European languages, that’s accomplished by the subjunctive mood. I’ll leave you to look it up on your own, but as a couple examples: </p>
<p>“If QGRE was more difficult, I would probably like it.”</p>
<p>“Still, it would be sweet if b@r!um was correct.”</p>
<p>‘Was’ should be replaced by ‘were.’ Also, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt since you’re not a native speaker, but your writing comes off as painfully contrived and stilted. Economy of expression is also a good rule to go by…</p>
<p>It is definitely not worth mentioning in a graduate school application. It requires too much explanation, and besides, graduate school is not about intelligence. It’s about hard work and persistence. Very intelligent people wash out all the time if the program is just not for them.</p>
<p>My opinions on intelligence testing arise from studying psychology (I’m a psych grad student). I’ve taken some classes on measurement theory, although that’s not my specialty - but one of my specialties is survey research and quantitative psychology. First of all, ask 5 experts on intelligence for a definition and you’ll get 5 different definitions. The truth is, the field has not defined intelligence and there’s a lot of infighting about what it actually is. If we don’t even know what something is, how can we measure it? Second of all, emerging literature is postulating that there are many measures of intelligence and not one universal idea of intelligence.</p>
<p>Third of all - from a cultural psychologist’s perspective - IQ tests are somewhat biased towards a particular kind of intelligence and may disadvantage members of certain groups (and I’m not just talking about race). Like you said, high IQ seems to imply liking logical things. Well, that’s not necessarily because intelligent people think in logical ways; that’s because the Western upper-middle-class scholars who designed intelligence tests believe that logic is what’s to be valued in intelligence. The test can’t be universally applied.</p>
<p>Also, from a purely measurement/statistics standpoint - IQ tests stop being reliable after a certain point in the measurement. That’s because by definition, there are too few people in the upper reaches of the score range than in the middle. Your average IQ test, assuming that the construct is valid, may be able to distinguish between a 110 and a 115 but not so much between a 160 and a 165 or even between a 160 or a 170. So after a certain percentile/score (i can’t say what, it depends on the test) your scores become meaningless and there’s not much difference.</p>
<p>You can believe whatever you want about the percentile ranks but the truth is, no one has done a survey to find out what the IQs are of college or graduate students. That’s because it’s not really useful or important. Once you get to graduate school, you will see - graduate school (and research) isn’t about intelligence. It’s about persistence, perseverance, a bit of creativity, and ambition. An average person with a lot of those traits will do far better in graduate school than the so-called 95th percentile scorer who lacks them all.</p>
<p>Also, you find it difficult to find cultural bias in abstract figures. I giggle. I do some cultural psychology research and one of my mentors is a cultural psychologist. If you look it up, you’ll find scads of reserach on how culture affects visual perception and cognitive processes.</p>
<p>98th percentile is not that high. It is too low to qualify a child for academically independent program in school districts that offer one. You would not only make yourself sound arrogant but also silly, since most phd candidates will have higher IQ than yours.</p>
<p>The 98th percentile is not that high? This thread has gone from silly to more silly. </p>
<p>I’m fairly certain that everyone contributing to this thread values intelligence and that we all admire evidence of brilliance. But that’s not the point of this thread. The question is whether a high IQ score has a place on a graduate school application and whether such a number can sway the adcom. The answer (and the OP has, I think, agreed with this) is no.</p>
<p>This quote, from Juillet, is worth repeating:</p>
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</p>
<p>william713</p>
<p>There is not one single graduate admissions committee on the planet that will care about your IQ. What they do care about is that you can formally demonstrate that you have the skills, knowledge base, experience, and personal drive that are necessary to perform at the level that they expect in the classroom/lab/research group. If you do not have a sufficient number of referees who can write effective letters of recommendation addressing these four items, you don’t have a chance of admission.</p>
<p>Since you have a very specific learning difference that affects your ability to score in the range normally expected of individuals in your field on the GRE, it is up to you and your referees to demonstrate that you can do the work. And not by saying “But my IQ is X”. You have to demonstrate it with documentation of your classroom work, research group work, publications, etc. That you were not permitted any accommodations when you took the GRE can be an indicator that the formal documentation of your LD is not very strong. You need to go back to the psychologist who did the testing, and build a stronger paper-trail on this one.</p>
<p>Be warned that many people who can score X on exam A, have never once in their lives thought through the theoretical bases of the assessment models used in exam A, and have never once in their lives considered that X on exam A is equivalent to Y on exam B, or to Z years of work in the laboratory of professor C. The people who dedicate their lives to this kind of thought most often are found in the Education Department of your university, where they are teaching courses in Ed. Psych. and Curriculum & Assessment. You may want to get one of them to help you determine some of your options.</p>
<p>Happymomof1, </p>
<p>I believe that your post was misdirected at William. Two people have posted questions about including IQ – William (the OP) and Katanaji, who says she has a specific learning disability. Your post is indeed an important one for Katanaji to read.</p>
<p>Dear all,</p>
<p>I believe this thread has gone on long enough. Although more data is always good, there has been a serious lack of fresh opinions since the first three replies.</p>
<p>This thread served its purposes excellently. I got the answer to my question, and due to some good old stupid arguing I was able to let off some nervousness caused by the last Saturday’s PGRE.</p>
<p>Some closing comments from me:</p>
<p>Thanks for cosmicfish for well-mannered messages. I apologize I won’t answer to your last message properly. One reason is that your last sentence about lack of concrete evidence is absolutely correct.</p>
<p>Thanks for Atican for language tips. I’m still not sure if your original purpose was to insult, but thanks nevertheless.</p>
<p>Thanks for juillet for excellent message. Although I didn’t try very hard, I wanted to make it clear I’m using terms intelligence and IQ to mean only logical reasoning skill and speed. </p>
<p>I’m not sure what you implied about the 125/130 average IQ of graduate students. For the record, based on a survey done by my nation’s Mensa, and my own personal experience, I don’t believe 125 or 130 are even close to the average IQ of a graduate student. I agree that conventional research is not as much about IQ as other traits, and I argue that coursework is even less. Thus, there is no reason at all that someone who does well in class has particularly high IQ. Therefore, I do not think it is plausible that the part of the population with the highest IQ is selected to graduate school. Given that most high IQ people do not learn hard work in school, which causes many of them to run into problems in college when pure IQ is not enough anymore, I would be tempted to actually argue that graduate school does anti-select high IQ. However, because there is no current evidence, I will not pursue that line of thought further.</p>
<p>I admit that I am not an expert by even an intercontinental range shot, but my current opinion about the cultural performance of IQ tests resembles that of James D. Watson. If a person such as he got in deep trouble for quoting facts, I’d probably get a negative response also.</p>
<p>brysia’s comment made me interested. What percentile qualifies a child for such a program? The only figure I found by googling was IQ of 130, eg 98th percentile.</p>
<p>And, to happymomof1:
I believe you are mistaking me to the other person, who replied that her IQ is high and she has a learning disorder. I do not. And, since there has been some doubt about it in this thread, my research experience is extensive, with good-quality results, and I am not one bit worried about my LOR’s.</p>
<p>Lastly, I’m very concerned about culture which I’m looking to join. Regardless of some replies I thought to be quite hostile, my opinion of Americans is still good. Thanks. And since this is probably my last message here with this account, I would like to thank Momwaitingforvew specifically. You have been very helpful.</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>William 713 (which is not my real name)</p>
<p>Some facts from “Guiding the Gifted Child” by James T. Webb, et al, copyright 1994. A book for parents and teachers.</p>
<p>Page 5 has has a Bell curve and a chart which includes the following info, based on a US population of 226,000,000. IQ 110-119 is high average or fast learner- 15.8%. IQ 120-129 is superior to gifted- 7.24%. IQ 130-139 is gifted to highly gifted- 2.0% (4,520,000 people). IQ 140 or above is exceptionally gifted or genius- 0.4% (904,000) people. Or, for the US: 1 out of 260 may have an IQ of 140 or above; 1 of 2,2330 IQ 150 or above; 1 of 31,560 IQ of 160 or above; 1 of 652,600 IQ 170 or above and 1 of 2,000,000 IQ of 180 or above. You can do the multiplication to figure out raw numbers and how many of your age. And these numbers are only for the US- think of the rest of the world population. </p>
<p>Even allowing for margins of error, etc there are over 4 million people in the US of all ages in the top 2%. Divide by 100 and you have over 400,000 of any age only counting the US. </p>
<p>IQ is only a potential. By the time you are posting on the CC grad site you have had plenty of opportunity to show evidence of application of your ability. Being in the top 2% is not all that special in the realm of gifted education. Those that combine above average intelligence with hard work go further than those with merely a high IQ. Also, you need to take into account that the overall IQ is a measure of more than one area of intelligence. For simplicity’s sake divide it into math and verbal. Those with better math aptitude- and interest- are likely to go into fields where that is a plus whereas those with high verbal abilities into fields where their skills are top. Those whose IQ reflects equally high values in both will go where their interest lie most likely.</p>