Books such as, Ultimate IQ Tests: 1000 Practice Test Questions to Boost Your Brain Power (2012) by Philip Carter & Ken Russell 2012) present test items that resemble the kinds of questions that a person encounters on standard IQ tests such as the Wechsler WAIS IV and the Stanford-Binet. Working through these tests can be helpful in raising awareness about the kinds of questions that appear on standard IQ tests. Items involving pattern identification, such as Raven’s progressive matrices, require some understanding of how to identify patterns in a sequence of diagrams that change as you scan from left to right. Practising such items can help a person to develop some facility in answering such questions.
However, the great value of standard IQ tests is the extensive investment that companies make in “norming the tests.” This means that they administer their tests to a large number of people of various ages and record the percentage of people in each age group that score at certain levels. Then they map these scores onto a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard distribution 15 (or 16) enabling them to identify an IQ score with the percentage of people who scored at that level. Consequently an IQ score of 100 or less is obtained by half the population of that age group. Furthermore, only 16% of people of a particular age cohort have an IQ of 115 or more and only 2.4% of people have an IQ of 130 or more.
The value of an IQ score, is that it enables a person to compare their score with the average, providing them with a rough approximation of their cognitive skills relative to others. Of course, IQ tests don’t measure creativity, long-term problem solving ability, or imagination, so they are only an approximation to a person’s true intelligence, but they are the best measure we have and correlate well with employment potential. While creating IQ tests involves a great deal of work and some insight into test building, the real value comes from the huge data base resulting from field-testing and norming the IQ tests. That’s why IQ tests are so closely guarded and a psychologist can lose his or her licence if they share or distribute one of the standard IQ tests. For more detailed information on IQ tests, visit: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/what-are-the-best-tests-for-measuring-your-iq/.
