21 Year old attempts IQ tests for the first time
The other week I was watching a TV programme where this guy stated he had an extremely high IQ, like it made him instantly superior to all the peons he was associated with.
What is smart though?
We all knew those people who at school did really well. Like in primary school days they were top of the class. They always got top grades, and then there was you. You tried hard but no matter how much you studied, they always did better in the spelling test.
Then secondary school came, still the same old story — apart from you weren’t in their class anymore as they were in the maths set above you.
GCSEs came and went, and if you got over 5 Cs you could do A levels or Level 3 BTECs. Still, them ‘brainiacs’ got better grades then you. They ended up getting into Cambridge to study Astrophysics whilst you went off to Uni of Skegness to study Toilet Management with a year in sewage studies.
It is funny all of this is. I have known people who do study really hard and do well. I know people who don’t study and do well, and then I know people who didn't study and didn’t even get a single GCSE. And we all know that one person who actually did try really hard, but still failed at school.
I have always been that average student who only did well because I studied hard. Well, as hard as I could. I could’ve done better if I put in more work, and I could have easily got nothing if I didn't care.
I can understand why some people hated school. After graduating university and entering the real world I finally realised that education is just education. You can have all the best grades in the world but it will mean nothing if you lack skills elsewhere and Doreen is beating you with the sales at work.
What is smart?
Sheldon Cooper is meant to have an IQ of 187. Apparently. But the guy may be amazing at Physics, but he can barely master anything else.
Smart people are meant to have high IQs.
Knowing little about ‘Intelligence Quotients’ apart from that Einstein had an estimated high IQ of 160, whilst Forrest Gump had a low score of 75 — I decided it would be fun for me to check my IQ score out.
Basically, I wanted to see if I was ‘smart’ or not.
I decided to check out various online IQ tests and, although not official, do 3 of them to get an accurate-ish score. This would allow me to see what a range of ‘IQ’ tests would be like and hopefully get a balanced score. Please note that I have never done a test like these before, apart from those annoying psychometric tests one does during some job interviews. And I always did bad in those.
These 3 IQ tests I found online. I had to set aside £11 to do these (some of them they didn’t tell you to pay until the end), there are free ones but I wanted to get an accurate as score as possible so I aimed to do 2 paid ones and 1 free one.
IQ test number 1:
Website: https://iq-test-international.org
Price: £8.99
This was my first one, and my least favourite. It was one of those ones where you get given some shapes, and have to pick out the next one in the sequence. Some of these were soo baffling and I didn’t have the patience to sit there and work them out that I decided to guess a couple.
It also had 40 questions. All of them seemed to be along the same lines as the ones before.
I paid the price of guessing and after paying 9 quid to see my results I was not too pleased to see I had a result of 94.
They tried to make me feel better by saying it was average, and that I was ‘above 41% of the population’ or some other nonsense. It did nothing but made me feel like crap.
I have a degree in Biochemistry, which to be honest didn’t require too much brains but I have always been in the higher sets at school so I was perplexed as to why my IQ was sub average.
I had to do another one.
IQ test number 2:
Website: https://brainable.com/quiz?
Price: £1.99
I preferred this one. It had a mixture of questions. ‘Spatial awareness’, ‘cognitive ability’, ‘mathematical reasonability’ — you get the gist. I think because of the mixture of questions meant I was better at some of the questions than the others:
I got a higher IQ result, this time of 112. I felt better now.
I wanted to find out how to do a legit IQ test. I found out that this place called Mensa is where all the high IQ people go. It is a society, and only the smart people can join.
To get in you need to do a proper IQ test. One with pens and paper. Old school style.
But on their website they have an IQ challenge — like a typical IQ test I did before. If you do well on it then you can be invited to do the proper test, and if you ace that then you will be a member of the high IQ society. Pretty cool.
IQ test number 3:
Website: https://www.mensa.org.uk/workout
Price: FREE *but doesn’t give an actual IQ result*
This test was the best one. Maybe I had learnt the secrets of IQ tests or something because I found it a doddle:
To good to be true? Probably yes.
Will I do the real IQ test? Absolutely not.
What I have learnt from doing these IQ tests is that they are very specific. The fact that they can be used to estimate someones instinctive intelligence I understand, but in the end they are pointless. For me, being smart and intelligent is totally different than knowing which shape rotates 480 degrees downwards.
