How To Survive An Average Iq
If the truth be known…you don’t have an IQ at all!!
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…
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 their own genius.
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.
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 shaped other geniuses…like Henry James and Charles Dickens…who followed her…and it continues to shape modern literature.
She might not do very well on an IQ test because the content of the test would be largely irrelevant to her gifts. And Thomas Edison would be put into special ed classes…as learning disabled…or as “addled” brained as he was diagnosed. He only had three months of formal schooling.
Well…where is this leading?
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Geniuses are original creative thinkers whose legacy is never outdated but is ever fresh.
So here is a primer on the misconceptions and nature of the IQ test.
Misconception 1
You have an IQ. You do not 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 high IQ people have made judgments and decisions that are truly lame brained.
Everyone can cite times when politicians…most of whom have advanced degrees…did unbelievably stupid things. And others can cite times when high IQ surgeons 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?
IQ stands for ‘intelligence quotient‘…a score. It does not stand for intelligence.
A quotient…you remember…is the answer you get when you divide one number by another. An IQ is a number…not a quality of your brain.
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 quotient = 1.1
To avoid fractions…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…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” 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…heavily researched…test that tells you your percentile rank…and he arbitrarily made a score of 100 equal to the 50th percentile.
Because the IQ label was so entrenched in the public vocabulary…he converted percentile ranks to IQs for ease of communication. But a score on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) is nothing more than your rank among your age peers…on that test.
So a WAIS-R score of 100 (50th percentile) means that 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 paragraphs. The tests 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 impossible dream. If you think a claim to genius is out of the question for you because you “have” only an average IQ…forget about it. You might just make the impossible dream a reality the way Thomas Edison did.
Thomas Drummond, Ph.D. is trained in clinical, developmental and neuropsychology. He has worked with the problems of clergy and religious of the catholic church for more than 20 years. Many of them…despite an average IQ above the 84th percentile…lost their careers in ministry because of faulty judgment. Learn more at http://www.boundaries-for-effective-ministry.org
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