Re: Can a 298 IQ be real? No way.

[Victor Steinbok <Victor.Steinbok@VERIZON.NET>]

At 1:07 PM -0800 3/12/02, Art Burke wrote:
>  >>> Allen.Flanigan@USPTO.GOV 03/12 12:35 PM >>>
> Ah, you psychometricians are all alike.
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Yup.  The Adventure is Standard.

Boys, boys,

For something so completely meaningless, you are sure using a lot of
bandwidth to exercise that intellectual prowess of yours. Can we quit
this BS now? What seems to have escaped your attention is something
else that was hidden in the text--and the story first came out about
a week before you all noticed it--the kid was COACHED for the IQ
test. Last I recall, someone on this list was pointing out that one
cannot be *taught* to have a higher IQ, that the score is a function
of age and innate intelligence. (And, surely, we don't want to recall
who that "someone" was, do we? We are only in the business of
discussing ideas, right?)

In fact, the kid is now said to have been coached for ALL tests--not
that this diminishes his mental ability, but we are not talking about
the kid here, are we? The real question is what do all these
test-score-derived indices show? In particular, what is the value of
the IQ index (of 298 or whatever) that can be changed under coaching?

These, of course, are rhetorical questions. But who among this list
will bother to point out to the New York Times or anyone else who
asks that this story invalidates many a theory behind testing? Or we
all going to sit on our hands?

I'll give another anecdote (yes, anecdote) concerning variability of
IQ scores. One of ed professors I work with has claimed to have been
growing up in the age of competing IQ tests (that would be, oh, 50-60
years ago?). So, in school, this person was given every IQ test
imaginable, including more than once on some of them. The bottom line
is that the score--whether on the same scale or different ones--kept
rising, not as a result of coaching, but as a result of retaking the
tests.

I would like to see a couple of IQ theorists try to shut down these
two examples of IQ variability. In this case, copious amounts of data
are not necessary--just a handful of stories like this can
demonstrate rather conclusively the bankruptcy of measurability of
intelligence theories.

       VS-)

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