bandman

Today I got the results from a series of four IQ tests I had taken to help a friend with some research he was doing in a graduate class. The tests were taken on four different days, at the same time of day, in the same room. The four tests, while different in content, had the same basic style of questions. My four scores were 129, 131, 139 and 141. Here are some interesting observations that came from the tests.

Every person in our group took the same four tests, and every person had scores lowest on the first test, and each score got higher until the final test.

The order of our scores was over 90% consistent from one test to the next, in other words, the same person scored the lowest on all the tests, and another person scored the highest on all the tests, with very little variation in the middle scores.

Our scores were given to us by a code number so that we didn’t have to share our scores if we didn’t want to do so. Most of us had all been friends for a long time, so of course we compared scores.

I was amazed to see some people whom I had always assumed were super intelligent had pretty average scores, and a few people who never really impressed me had very high scores. The guy who had the highest score on all four tests was the guy who I assumed would be at or near the bottom. He is the only guy in our local test group who did not finish college.

The local test group was a group of guys who all went to school with the guy who gave the test and most of us have known each other for over 25-years because we all played in the same university band. All of our scores were pretty close to one another, which I assume means that you do hang around with those people on your mental level.

One man in the group is now a medical doctor. His scores were right in the middle of the pack. Band directors had the 4 highest scores (that was a scary result)! We were all in band at the same college within a 7-year period, so I can’t say how music helped or hurt us in our scores, in fact the person who put the group together had to make a notation on his study as to how we knew each other, therefore showing a group abnormality which could explain why our scores were skewed to the higher percentiles.

One last thing that I thought was amusing. There was a survey given prior to the study to learn about us in our personal lives. We all said the same thing on one question. We all claimed to be poor spellers, and we all use spell check on our computers as habit!

So I say so much for IQ tests. My scores were pretty good, but I have a lot of education which I’m sure helped my scores be higher. I was told that the average score nation wide on this battery of tests was 100, and in my state (Louisiana) it was 104. The lowest scores came from Mississippi and West Virginia, both at 94, and the highest scores came from the District of Columbia with 115, and from a few states tied at 114.

One last comment, this set of tests was given to friends, or groups, put together by graduate students working in Master of Education or Doctoral of Philosophy in Education programs. I wonder how non-scientific our results are compared to a normal group of people (those of various educational levels). I would think that most groups were like ours – friends of the graduate school students who agreed out of friendship to take part in a study that took a considerable amount of time. What I’m saying is that I’m assuming that the results of this study are slanted to the higher side. I wonder if the same is true of most of the studies we hear about on television?

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