I heard at local Mensa that there is a guy who keeps coming to take the IQ test every year, and every year he fails to pass the Mensa limit. And he’s been doing this at least for a decade.
For me, it is difficult to imagine, because Raven’s matrices (the IQ test my local Mensa usually uses) is like the same two or three patterns over and over again. How could anyone take the test twice without noticing this? And if you notice the pattern, then you should get at least 80% of questions right very easily, which probably should be enough to pass the Mensa limit...
...but then, from my perspective, it doesn’t make sense how anyone could get a result other than “random answers” and “almost everything correct”, and yet apparently most people end up somewhere in between, which means that I am confused about something.
Maybe noticing that “it’s the same two or three patterns over and over again” is how high IQ feels from inside; and if you have average IQ, it just seems like a sequence of independent puzzles with increasing difficulty, dunno. Or maybe most people only take the test once, and essentially run out of time before they recognize the repetitive pattern, and don’t take the second try where they could score higher by applying the knowledge of (the existence of) the pattern from the very beginning. Or a bit of both.
By the way, after you do the test, you are told the IQ and maybe the number of questions you answered correctly, but you are not told which ones you answered wrong and what was the correct answer. So if your problem was lack of time, then repetition can help… but if your problem was being unable to tell the difference between the right and wrong answer, then repetition does not help. (Other than introducing some random noise, so if your real IQ is e.g. 120, if you roll the dice often, once you get lucky on the questions you answered randomly, and pass the 130 limit—but that’s not “getting better” in the strict sense.)
I heard at local Mensa that there is a guy who keeps coming to take the IQ test every year, and every year he fails to pass the Mensa limit. And he’s been doing this at least for a decade.
For me, it is difficult to imagine, because Raven’s matrices (the IQ test my local Mensa usually uses) is like the same two or three patterns over and over again. How could anyone take the test twice without noticing this? And if you notice the pattern, then you should get at least 80% of questions right very easily, which probably should be enough to pass the Mensa limit...
...but then, from my perspective, it doesn’t make sense how anyone could get a result other than “random answers” and “almost everything correct”, and yet apparently most people end up somewhere in between, which means that I am confused about something.
Maybe noticing that “it’s the same two or three patterns over and over again” is how high IQ feels from inside; and if you have average IQ, it just seems like a sequence of independent puzzles with increasing difficulty, dunno. Or maybe most people only take the test once, and essentially run out of time before they recognize the repetitive pattern, and don’t take the second try where they could score higher by applying the knowledge of (the existence of) the pattern from the very beginning. Or a bit of both.
By the way, after you do the test, you are told the IQ and maybe the number of questions you answered correctly, but you are not told which ones you answered wrong and what was the correct answer. So if your problem was lack of time, then repetition can help… but if your problem was being unable to tell the difference between the right and wrong answer, then repetition does not help. (Other than introducing some random noise, so if your real IQ is e.g. 120, if you roll the dice often, once you get lucky on the questions you answered randomly, and pass the 130 limit—but that’s not “getting better” in the strict sense.)