Can Someone PLEASE tell me my IQ?!

If you spend any time on the internet, which is rather likely given the circumstances, you are likely to have been bombarded at one time or another by websites inviting you to “Test your IQ”. For whatever reason, this has turned into some incredible advertising gimmick, and yet every couple of years I find myself back on line trying to figure out what my “True IQ” is.

Every test promises you an answer, and yet every test gives you a different answer. On any given day, depending on the nature of the test (and the nature of my brain at the time), I can score anything from “Average” to “Genius”. For what it’s worth, a score on a test could never make you a genius any more than a glass of wine could make you an alcoholic. Nonetheless, I continue my quest, like a dog chasing its tail, for that elusive number that will define me as an individual of intellectual value.

I write from South Africa, where we don’t have SAT’s or any uniform yardstick of that nature. I can recall writing aptitude tests in the ninth grade, but the results of those were carefully guarded, as if knowing your “true” ability would have some devastating effect on your ability to function as a human being. There is always the option of writing to my old high school to dig up the results, but my fear is twofold: Either they will have the results and I will discover I am far from the genius of my egomaniacal imaginings, or they will view my request as either bizarre or ridiculous and I will be unable to recover from the embarrassment.

Then there is the third option; arrange a test with Mensa and get it over with. If I pass the test (that is, get into the top 2% of the world population) I might be reassured. If I fail, I might complain that the test was measuring the wrong things. Case in point: I can still remember the time pressures of the euphemistically named “aptitude tests” that I wrote twenty-five years ago, and how I couldn’t finish any of the papers completely. Later on I discovered that that is the whole purpose of IQ tests; only the geniuses manage to finish. So then it occurred to me that the test is not measuring abilities in the varied areas of logical-mathematical, verbal, and visual-spatial at all. It is only measuring one ability, and that ability is processing speed.

From what I can make out from all the IQ sites that abound, processing speed is one measure of ability, but surely it cannot be the primary measure. Some high IQ societies welcome scores from unsupervised, untimed, high range tests. Some don’t. According to Mensa, if it wasn’t timed, it doesn’t count. Some twenty odd years ago the Guinness Book of Records stopped recording the highest IQ on record because no-one could agree how it was to be measured. The last world record belonged to columnist Marilyn vos Savant, and her name seems to be etched into history now.

I have a friend who worked with a man who claimed to be the “cleverest man in the world”. I won’t name him because he is well known in local IQ circles. But according to my friend, he was more interested in completing high range IQ tests than he was in his career as a statistician. For some, these IQ tests have become an addiction and obsession, and from time to time I fear myself falling down that slippery slope. Surely we can just do one test that will give us the true answer, and then we can leave the whole thing alone!

Can somebody please tell me, what is that test?