Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment How can IQ tests be so WRONG?

My daughter had two IQ tests in her life-- one in first grade (IQ came back 114) and one in 4th grade (IQ came back 122). On the basis of those IQ tests I had to do some serious pushing to get her into the gifted program even provisionally.

Now fast forward five years. She's never had a grade lower than an A. Her MAP scores are in the 95th percentile in everything, and her math scores regularly put her so far beyond the 99th percentile that her RANGE is 99th-99th percentile. Her ACT scores in 7th grade put her above the 50th percentile for high school seniors in every single subject-- and she just missed the 90th percentile in a couple. She's won the regional science fair, the middle school geography AND spelling bee (went to state with the spelling), a national foreign language contest, and of course every math competition she's ever entered. Now as a freshman she's taking all the most advanced courses her high school offers (including Honors Algebra II, Honors Biology,
Honors English, and Honors World Geography) and she's ranked #1 in a class of 550. And while she DOES study, it's not liek she burns candles at both ends or anything. It's usually one or two hours a night--if that.

According to the IQ tests, she doesn't have the capacity to do any of this. (I guess she must be grabbing her intelligence out of the sky somewhere.) Are the IQ tests just flat-out wrong-- and if so, what good are they anyway? Why not rely on out-of-level achievement tests instead?

People/children can have a PG IQ and perform poorly in school and others can have an average or only above average IQ and perform extremely well.
To me, so much of "success" in life is what you make of whatever talents you have. There is no short-cut for hard work. Being organized, working hard, and being a friendly person will get you very, very far in this world. Having a high IQ with nothing else won't get you very far.

Well they might have made a mistake...you could always try testing again.

A program like DYS, in my understanding, would take achievement scores into consideration, such as using the achievement tests and portfolio items (2 out of 3 required categories) and not the IQ so they obviously are supportive of high achievement regardless of IQ?

Having a EG/PG IQ doesn't guarantee anything, but then again it doesn't doom you. A person might have to work on the organization, friendliness or other skills that come more naturally to others with a more "even" package, and some EG/PG people also have other exceptionalities (twice-exception) that present challenges.

There is also something to be said for the concept of "optimal IQ" or "optimal intelligence" where you're enough above average to naturally do better than someone who's average, but not so far above average that you have a hard time relating to the majority of people, dealing with asynchronous development for years as a young child and things like that.

Even though you had to push, if your daughter was accepted into the gifted program she sort of had the best of all worlds...no learning differences, not to much trouble related to being the odd one out, and the support of that extra enrichment or accleration that a gifted program could offer her.

Do you know which tests she was given?

IQ tests don't measure motivation, passion, or heart. And also - an IQ of 122 isn't an IQ that would preclude a person from any of what you've mentioned above! It is actually a higher-end IQ, just not up at the way-high-extreme.

FWIW, I have three kids with three different IQ ranges. My kid with the EG IQ is the child who struggles the most in school and in life (he's 2e fwiw, but I think he wouldn't fit in well at school even if he wasn't 2e). My youngest dd is HG but has achievement way up in the stratosphere that you'd think it would be in if achievement absolutely correlated with IQ. The thing I notice about her vs my EG ds is that he thinks soooo way outside the box, very differently. He seems to come up with incredibly creative ideas out of thin air. He asks amazingly deep complicated questions. He understands concepts in a snap. He is studying college-level courses at home for fun, but has a tough time turning in homework at school. He spends a lot of his time at school excruciatingly bored.

My high-achieving dd is a kid who's brain works really well within the way our school systems are set up. She isn't so out-there smart that she could be working several grade levels ahead, so she is very successful at challenging coursework aimed for smart kids at her grade level or one-two grade levels ahead. I don't mean that in a negative way - it's a good thing, and she's obviously a smart student. But she's also able to be successful within our school system in part (jmo) simply because she's not sooo danged far outside the IQ box. I suspect she'll find easy success in life too - as will most of us, regardless of our IQs.

FWIW, my middle dd has the lowest IQ of my three kids (not low, just lower). She doesn't do terribly well in school because she's not motivated. She also is by far (and I mean BY FAR) the happiest of all three of my kids. It's just her personality - she's happy. She's also very social. She hasn't really reached a point in her own life where she sees any need to achieve at anything.

Your dd sounds amazing! You must be very proud of her

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - one other thought to add - back when our ds was being tested for our school district gifted program, the teachers were always excited about his IQ scores - because they said that most of the students in the program were able to get the achievement scores but they had a tough time getting their ability scores to come in where they were technically supposed to be to fit into the qualifying matrix.

My car's speedometer shows it can go up to 140MPH. I've never driven it past 80MPH, even though I know it can go much faster.

My DD8's IQ score meets the DYS requirements, but she clearly does not drive herself past 80MPH. We didn't even see a need to apply. Her shifting interests and passions are not academic. I tried to bribe her this morning to practice memorizing the times tables she struggles with, and she said, "Not gonna happen."

Per bzylzy's comments, I embrace the "optimal IQ" concept. I look at someone like your daughter, and I see great potential for success in any field that demands both higher intelligence and the ability to study and work hard. She sounds very well rounded and accomplished and happy.

My DD has suffered from asynchronous development and emotional intensities since birth it seems. Keeping her happy in her own skin and properly socialized has been our focus, and that takes much of everyone's energy. While she gets straight A's for now, she is quite scattered and disorganized, and her IQ profile suggests that mentally she has one long leg and one short leg.

I have sometimes half-jokingly thought that upper-end IQ scores may better indicate learning disabilities rather than abilities.

For some people, IQ tests just don't work. My roommate in college was like that. He tested relatively low on IQ tests, but he was obviously extremely intelligent and now he wanders the corporate world on his company's nice corporate jet.

I think the issue of achievement tests vs. IQ tests is to find the intelligent people, not the people who cram for achievement tests. I don't think there's a good way to find the high achievers who just don't do well on IQ tests.

The short answer is that psychological tests like the IQ test are just going to be wrong for a certain percentage of the population and there is just no way around that. It's in the nature of psychological tests. It's not engineering, it's psychology.

That's great Pru.

My lovely aunt has been saying since my DD was about 2 or 3 that she is a "special needs child". That doesn't mean the same thing that would get her services in school, but she does have special parenting and educational needs.

Hi Tante - Welcome. You've asked a complicated question, and it you are interested in learning more about Giftedness, I'd recommend you read some of the articles at www.hoagiesgifted.org/


There are a lot of tests in the world, some are considered more likely to be accurate (individual vs. group tests: individual tests are considered more likely to be accurate) - so my first guess is that the tests were group tests, such as CoGat. Many people feel that unusually intelligent kids are particularly likely to do poorly, while it's a good test for bright kids.

My second guess is that your daughter's IQ sores are quite variable - so that the 'full scale IQ' isn't representative of her strengths. We this this quite often. I wish that schools looked more deeply into a WISC score, but many districts don't.

If neither of those apply to your situation, I'd say that she is what she is, and the tests fail to demonstrate it, as they do in a small percentage of the time.

But her ACT scores in 7th grade clearly show that she is gifted. I'm glad your district had a gifted program that you were able to get her included in - many districts have no program at all. There is a lot of 'unfairness' in this area of life.

I'm super glad to hear that she is doing well and enjoying success.

Smiles,
Grinity

My son had his first IQ test at age 5. He scored above 150 on the verbal portion, but below 90 on the non-verbal portion. He came out with an FSIQ score of around 116, which was only 1 SD above the mean for that test. He was later tested on a different test. His Verbal IQ on that test was at the 99th percentile, his non-verbal score was at the 50th percentile, and his processing speed was at the 2nd percentile. Not surprisingly, his FSIQ was, again, only around 1 SD above the mean. The FSIQ on these two tests was a terrible measure of his IQ. The index scores gave a much better picture of his abilities and disabilities. The psychologist who tested him the first time indicated that he had obvious non-verbal disabilities, and the Verbal score alone was the much better measure of his intellectual potential. (The person who administered the second test was not a psychologist, just someone that the school system had "trained" to administer and score the test, not assess its implications.)

It is possible that your child has some subtest scatter either within the subtests on each index or between her index scores, and it is this scatter or variability that brings her FSIQ down to "only" 1.5 SD above the mean, or it is possible that she is a very motivated person with an IQ of 122 - which is pretty close to the mean IQ of physicians and Ph.D-level scientists, so it is nothing to sneeze at.