Quote:
Originally Posted by Mycroft
Short and sweet:
I have, in my life, known people with supposedly low IQs who consistently picked up on things I overlooked and whose friendship has been indispensable, and people with supposedly high IQs whose heads were so far in the clouds they were about as useful as a zero dollar bill. So what the hell are IQ tests measuring?
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They measure your ability answer a set of questions. These questions are meant (in general) to produce two sets of numbers - gF and gC. These results are then used to compare to other test results and surveys.
They work well at predicting other results, such as job performance, academic achievement, rate of learning, bredth of knowledge, rate of information absorbtion, etc. In some cases, they have been shown to be among the best predictors of the above despite having no underlying association with them. (gF and gC measuring slightly different things, correlations may vary, some conditions, like job type/area of study, blah blah).