Another part that annoys me, I must admit, is having never met anyone online who claims their IQ is below 140. That would be, like, less than 1 percentile of the population or something, right? But I guess I'm meetin' 'em all! Sorry, someone's lying somewhere. Apparently tons of folks are casually walking into psychiatrists' offices and getting elaborate, hours-long Stanford-Binet clinical IQ tests performed on them, all the time! Wow, business must be booming -- and all for vanity purposes, too, I presume. Amazing.
Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, get stuck in traffic on the way to take the test, get flustered, didn't have your morning coffee, stressed out about finances -- all that stuff affects your performance on that one test, that one day. IQ tests might measure one's specific test-taking ability at a certain time and while one's in a certain mood or state of mind, but beyond that, to extrapolate a number, and, further, to extrapolate everything else that's extrapolated from it -- it's outrageous.
Just recently James Watson came out again saying blacks have lower IQs than whites. It just never stops, that sort of garbage.
-B.
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
"And then there is the learned helplessness effect. Kids who are repeatedly subjected to standardized tests that are implicitly 'the ultimate indicator' of their worthiness as human being in the environment in which they spend most of their time - and they are not that good at standardized test taking -quickly learn that they are not good at all and act accordingly. Since they are not tested in their social, creative, artistic etc. skills.. In my book, standardized testing is an educational version of fascism and a crime against humanity."