High IQ Indeed!
Mon., April 6, 01:29 PM
Psychology 101 was where I learned that a high IQ really isn’t everything. A recent segment on “CBS Sunday Morning” featured Mensa, the organization for people with high IQ’s. I remember that I considered applying myself, as I do know I qualify, but for various reasons I never did. One reason was that I didn’t have the money. Maybe that’s a clue? If the high IQ is so special, how come I didn’t have any money? By the time I could afford the application fee, I had decided I really didn’t need the organization.
Anyway, I did know what my IQ was ever since I took psychology in college. That was a strange course — not because of the subject matter but because of the way we did it. It was a summer course, and we had to do a semester’s work in six weeks; we had classes five evenings a week, and the sessions were long. There was one twenty-minute break each evening.
After talking about testing and how it was done, we were ready to experience a test. We were to take our Stanford-Binet tests (standard IQ tests) and score them in the first part of the evening, and analyze and discuss results during the latter part. I had often taken such tests. They are designed so that there are more questions than can be answered in the time allotted. But I finished the test. No one was more surprised than I; it had never happened before.
I figured out how I had been able to do it. First, of course, was just a matter of experience. I had taken these tests before and knew how they worked. But I had also recently taken a course in logic, an important aspect of IQ testing. Many of the questions that I used to do instinctively were logic examples. With that course fresh in my mind, I knew procedures for those examples and did them faster. I had learned something that wasn’t in the syllabus: you can indeed be taught to master IQ tests.
On that particular day, I had a sore foot and chose to remain in the classroom during break. It was easy enough to eat my snack and read a little till the other students returned. The instructor was using the time to put some graphs on the blackboard. You are probably familiar with the standard bell graph, which is high in the middle and tapers at the extremities, forming a more or less symmetrical figure. This bell graph, using our test scores, looked pretty similar, except that way out at the right was my score. (It really messed up the symmetry!)
The instructor asked me whether I had known it was that high. “I knew it was above ___,” I told him, “but I never knew the exact number.” Results were supposed to be anonymous, of course, and I certainly was not about to share how I had done it. But as my classmates trickled back in, you could hear the whispered comments: “Who got the ___?”
The next day we took short tests on spatial relationships, an ability that is important to engineers and designers. The accepted theory was that boys would always score higher than girls. The two highest scores belonged to girls, pointing out that what “everybody knows” isn’t necessarily so. Incidentally, my score was second; another girl was first. So much for the high IQ.
I don’t remember the instructor’s name, which is too bad because he was a good instructor. I do remember a lot of what he taught. He had been a student of Abraham Maslow, whose theories were the most interesting of any psychologist I had encountered. As I have mentioned before, nothing I learn is wasted. Take a look at my own self-actualization.
My children scored higher than I did when they took their own IQ tests. Their teachers were quite impressed, and I felt that my teaching at home had helped. However, I never told them what their scores were. I was especially glad when my Middle Daughter happened to attend a statewide meeting of students who were in Talented and Gifted classes similar to hers. One rather snotty kid said, “My IQ is ___; what’s yours?” The M.D. could simply say, “I don’t know; my mother wouldn’t tell me.” (The snotty kid probably wouldn’t have believed her anyhow; hers is higher. Ahem.) It is far better to keep such knowledge a secret.
High intelligence without … ethics or morals or conscience… however you wish to term it, is very dangerous — both to the individual and to the people s/he interacts with. Such a person often lies freely, thinking s/he has everyone fooled. What’s the difference between the lies of a smart person and those of a not-so-smart person? The lies are more elaborate; they’re still untrue. I often think that, if such people had not been told they were smart, they would never have had the nerve to spread such stories.
I have been told, by Mensa members, that some of the people in the groups are really boring. On the other hand, I know people with high IQ’s who are really quite entertaining. Maybe someday I shall feel free to write about working for one.
