Re: IQ/10 /= Int
jester47 said:
On IQ/10 = Int:
I have been told by a person that administers IQ tests for a living that they do not test intelligence, but rather how you use what you know. With this in mind I would say that the IQ translates to wisdom. In my stats I figured that intelligence was based in memory and speed of recall, rather than reasoning and understanding ability, which I would say is wisdom.
Although I don't make a living (yet) administering IQ tests, I am certified to give them (and have done it a few times), so I know what I'm talking about.
IQ scores are standardized and more or less approximate a normal distribution (sorry, but you need to know some statistics to understand some of this). The population as a whole has a mean score of 100, with a standard deviation of 15 or 20 (depending on which IQ test you're using). Let's use 15. This means that 68% of the population has an IQ score of 100 plus or minus 15, that is, 85 to 115.
95% of the population has an IQ score of 100 plus or minus 2 standard deviations, that is, 70 to 130. A genius is someone who is 2+ standard deviations above the norm, which makes them smarter than 97.5% of the population.
The IQ scale was developed as a way to figure out which students would need extra help, and it serves its function pretty well. It's not that great at differentiating once you start pulling away from the norm. In other words, it was not developed to measure very high or very low scores. There are people who have IQ scores over 200, but it really doesn't tell us all that much except that they do really well on things that we normally associate with intelligence.
IQ tests measure verbal skills, mathematical skills, and reasoning ability. It's the best method we have of estimating intelligence, but it's still nothing more than an educated guess. For example, one of the marks of true genius is remarkable creativity, the ability to come up with solutions that no one before has been able to. But we have no way to measure creativity (effectively).
As defined by D&D, IQ is most closely related to Intelligence ("how well your character learns and reasons") although it also measures some things that are associated with Wisdom (perception, intuition). I'd say a genius would have an Int of 17+, with around 14-16 being gifted and 11-13 being above average.
I also caution people who have "taken tests" and "know" their IQ scores. Unless you've taken one of the standardized professional IQ tests, which involved lots of different tasks (many of which are not paper and pencil), administered to you by a qualified professional (which takes several hours to administer, and just as long or longer to score), you do NOT know your IQ score.
