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Is A High IQ Score An Asset
Not really. Because it means intelligence quotient it does not mean intelligence. And ... you will remember ... a quotient is what you get by dividing one number into another.
What??
You say 'to get into Mensa ... I had to take an IQ test and score in the genius range' Well there are geniuses and there are geniuses. If you look at the who's who of Mensa ... you find a list of 'prominent' members. Mostly fairly anonymous professionals ... a boxer ... a writer ... a judge who was a beauty queen and 'liked being a sex symbol'.
Some 'geniuses' score high on IQ tests and never leave a genius's legacy. While others ... some of whom were learning disabled ... invent the light bulb ... the combustion engine ... the telephone ... the computer ... etc. And some geniuses ... like Einstein ... have doubted that they even were geniuses.
There's no such thing as a 'genius' on an IQ test. The only test of genius is what a person actually puts out into the world. Think about these examples ...
Mary Ann Evans ... from a deeply religious nineteenth century family ... stopped formal religion-based schooling at 16 to live a free-thinking ... morally scandalous ... life. But ...
As George Eliot ... she taught herself ancient and modern languages ... among other things ... and became a published translator of German theological texts and one of the greatest fiction writers in the English language. Her influence drew praise from other geniuses ... like Henry James and Charles Dickens ... and it continues to shape modern literature.
She might not do very well on an 'intelligence' test because the content of the test would be largely irrelevant to her gifts. And Thomas Edison would be placed in special ed classes and put on ritalin ... diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and various learning disabilities. But he was only diagnosed as 'addled brained'. He only had three months of formal schooling.
Well ... what's the point?
IQ tests are widely misunderstood ... even by psychologists ... which is unforgivable.
Geniuses are original creative thinkers whose legacy is never outdated but is ever fresh. Did you know that all great fiction writers still use Aristotle's timeless structure for their characters and plots.
So here is a primer on the misconceptions and nature of the IQ test.
Misconception 1
You have an IQ. No you don't because ...
An IQ is a simple statistic. It has no psychological meaning any more than saying you have an address. Neither an IQ score nor a street address is part of you.
Misconception 2
A high IQ score means you're smart. It doesn't because ...
The judgments you make in life ... and the action you take on those judgments ... tells the world how smart you are ... not some test. Some people with high IQ scores have made judgments and decisions that are truly lame brained.
Think of politicians ... most of whom have advanced degrees ... who do unbelievably stupid things ... on a regular basis. And others can cite times when a surgeon with a high IQ score operated on the wrong patient or removed the wrong limb. Then there are military leaders who ... mistakenly ... gave orders to open fire on their own men.
In short ... a high IQ score doesn't coerce you to act intelligently.
So what is an IQ?
When the first IQ test was developed by Binet ... to rank order pupils by academic skill ... he used a scoring system for his test based on months.
When you got the right answer you got a month's credit. You then added up all of the months to get a 'mental age' ... and then divided that number by the months of your chronological age. So if you were 100 months old and you got a test score of 110 months ... you divide 110 months (your mental age) by 100 months (your actual age) and the IQ score ... the quotient = 1.1
To avoid fractions ... and to look smarter ... multiply the quotient by 100. So an IQ score of 1.1 becomes 110. That means you are slightly in advance of your chronological age and might be reading-ready before someone with a 99 IQ score ... but without motivation it doesn't matter.
Besides motivation ... the other ingredient of genius is imagination ... which is not measured by IQ tests. Geniuses imagine what isn't and what most people think is impossible. The 'addled brained' Thomas Edison would not have been able to spell impossible. No problem ... it wasn't part of his vocabulary anyway.
As time went on ... a psychologist named Wechsler abandoned the intelligence quotient calculation and devised a widely used test that tells you your percentile rank ... the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised ... or WAIS-R. And he arbitrarily made a score of 100 equal to the 50th percentile ... and called it an IQ score for ease of communication ... because nobody speaks of 'my percentile rank' as if they had one do they?
So a WAIS-R score of 100 (50th percentile) means 50% of your age peers did worse on the test than you did ... and 50% did better. A score of 85 means that 16% of your peers did worse than you and 84% did better. A score of 115 means that you did better on the test than 84% of your peers and 16% outperformed you. Notice that the percentages above and below you add up to 100%
So what do you know from these scores? Only the information given in the last paragraph. The test cannot tell who will invent the successor to the light bulb. And modern particle physicists are still trying to solve the nature of matter based on the Greek observation ... made thousands of years ago ... that everything is made of invisible atoms in motion.
There ... an IQ score is nothing more than your relative position to your age peers on a particular test. That's it.
So if you want to lay claim to genius ... forget the IQ that you don't have anyway ... and dream the dream that others may think is impossible. If you think a claim to genius is out of the question for you because you 'have' only an average IQ score ... forget about it. You might just make the impossible dream a reality the way Thomas Edison did.
Copyright 2007 by Thomas B. Drummond, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
About the author:
Thomas Drummond, Ph.D. is trained in clinical, developmental, and neuropsychology. For more than 20 years he has worked with ministers with high IQ scores who crossed boundaries inappropriately and lost their ministries ... because of a lack of rational intelligent thinking about what ministry is. To see a real example visit us at www.boundaries-for-effective-ministry.org/reparenting.html
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