Intelligence and its associated Quotient is something that many people do not like talking about. After all… if you have a low IQ, you don’t want to mention it, if you have an “average” IQ, you don’t want to be thought of as average, and if you have a high IQ if you ever mention it you will be accused of bragging. I was talking to someone tonight who recently did an IQ test (not one of those pseudo-tests that you take online, a proper one), and apparently he scored quite high, in the “second percentile”. Curiosity got the better of me… I had no idea how they shaped the bell curve or really what IQ represented… so I looked it up. It appears that the median for the human race would be 100, with 80 being the lower boundary and 120 the upper for “normal”.

Whilst the tests exist, do we ever really want to know what our IQ is? Some people argue that IQ is not something that can substantially change (unlike body shape), and there’s not much you can do about it. Typically, I’ve read that a person’s IQ will tend to decrease over time by a small amount, the amount depending on how active and challenged you keep your mind during your developing years.

So I ask… what is the point of IQ tests? If we are assessed to be stupid, we will be insecure for life. If we are assessed to be “average”, we will feel like we can never achieve something special because we’re stuck in the middle lane of the highway and someone else is bound to outsmart us. And if we’re “above average” we can be lulled into a false sense of security, or go down the path of perfectionism where we know we’re above average and self-loathe when we don’t achieve our potential. Even worse, on the extreme scales, we face other challenges with mental or physical disability, as unfortunately those extremes are rarely reached without some genetic abnormality.

So if someone said to you “here is your IQ score… a numerical value representing your life’s worth”, how would you feel? I know I didn’t want to know mine when I did the test.

Question to my readers… have you ever had an IQ test, and were you pleased / concerned with the result? No need to quote scores, unless you feel it’s important. Just your views on the whole process :-)