I took an IQ test in fifth grade. I will never forget one of the questions on the “general knowledge” section: “Who discovered America?”
Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently.
The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?”
Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them.
The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.
I'd be extremely surprised if you aren't misremembering. IQ tests are never supposed to have sections like "general knowledge", "history", "celebrity gossip", etc. "Who discovered America" is a textbook example of a non g-loaded question.
If such a section was used on a test they described as an "IQ test", it was almost certainly there only for statistical validation purposes.
There have been a number of studies done which ask obviously knowledge based questions, obviously g-loaded questions, and unknown questions. They then compare the statistical distribution of answers to the unknown questions to the obviously bad questions ("who discovered America") and the obviously good questions ("you want to carry a fox and two goats across the river in a 2 seated boat, but if you leave the fox alone with the goat the fox eats the goat..." [1]). If you aren't misremembering, I suspect you were participating in such a study.
[1] This is unbiased because all information is given. You don't need to know what a fox or goat is, or have ever seen a boat. It could be rephrased "you want to transport a X and two Y's from location A to location B. But if you leave an X and a Y alone, you fail."
I don’t think I am misremembering and I don’t think I was part of a study. This would have been around 1980, so the test was probably the WISC-R, which was published in 1974; maybe they got better about eliminating loaded questions in the WISC-III (which wasn’t published until 1991).
When I Google “who discovered america? wisc-r” I get several hits mentioning this test question.
Not to mention that the answer which gives you more points of IQ, hence meaning you're "smarter", isn't even correct. You can start with the native americans, go through to the vikings, and I read a book recently that made a very convincing case that the Chinese sailed to South America in 1421-1423 before they shut themselves off from the world for 400 years.
>This is unbiased because all information is given.
In this case, though, it is biased because some people will have heard the puzzle before, and having heard it before is tied to culture rather than to intelligence.
But even if you’re coming up with new questions all the time, a child who has experience solving this kind of problem will be at an advantage over a child who has never tried it.
Not only that, but questions can include a lot of implicit assumptions. One example I saw from a test was something along the lines of, "You go to a store. The sign says it's closed for lunch. It's currently 12:55, and you have an appointment at 1:30. What do you do?"
The correct answer was "Wait 10 minutes, then leave if it's not open." But people with lower incomes were disproportionately likely to say you should just walk away and come back some other time. This is because people in low-income neighborhoods have been taught that loitering in an empty lot leads to bad things.
I don't know about IQ tests, but this is certainly not true for the SAT. SAT prep only raises scores by about 30 pts (on the old 1600 pt test), at least according to studies not funded by Kaplan.
Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently.
The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?”
Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them.
The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.