Once in the distant, distant past, I had a contract job. Full-time, they paid me for 40 hours a week, but usually I'd have an hour or two of down time each day. Like, 2pm rolls around, and I've actually finished everything that needed to be done for the schedule, so hey, I've got some time.
I started taking online IQ tests. I looked around for the really hard ones, and found that they fall into a couple of categories. Some focused on obscure vocabulary, featuring lists of hundreds of words that I, a native speaker with a pretty good vocabulary, had never seen. Others tested spatial awareness, logic, whatever.
What I discovered, after taking a few of these tests (I skipped the vocab ones; what's the point of learnin' fancy words no one else knows?), is that you get better at them, and fast. I only took maybe 2 or 3 a day, a couple times a week, but it didn't take more than a week to start testing a lot higher.
It got kinda boring once I started seeing that kind of improvement, so I stopped. I'm curious what it'd be like to try again, though.
Clinical IQ tests are administered by psychologists and created by publishers. Pearsons WISC-IV Basic Kit costs $1,123.40.
It's a bit like brand-name drugs and generics, except that the generics aren't allowed to copy the exact chemical structure of the brand name drug in a similar way that research substances copy controlled substances with minor chemical alterations, with unknown effects.
Now these free online IQ tests could create their own IQ test, but that requires both expertise in creating IQ tests, and a large normative sample (WISC used a normative sample of 2,200 children between 6 and 16).
Furthermore, creating more accurate IQ tests does nothing for their bottom line, or may even hurt it as some of these tests are biased to give you higher scores, so that you may share them on social media.
Whilst you could invest in creating an accurate IQ test to be cheaply taken online, you'd have to fight the perception these less accurate tests have created that online IQ tests are about as accurate as horoscopes.
As an interesting note, pearson does offer computer based IQ tests under their Q interactive brand, however, they are not cheap.
I started taking online IQ tests. I looked around for the really hard ones, and found that they fall into a couple of categories. Some focused on obscure vocabulary, featuring lists of hundreds of words that I, a native speaker with a pretty good vocabulary, had never seen. Others tested spatial awareness, logic, whatever.
What I discovered, after taking a few of these tests (I skipped the vocab ones; what's the point of learnin' fancy words no one else knows?), is that you get better at them, and fast. I only took maybe 2 or 3 a day, a couple times a week, but it didn't take more than a week to start testing a lot higher.
It got kinda boring once I started seeing that kind of improvement, so I stopped. I'm curious what it'd be like to try again, though.