Click on the link below to take an Intelligence Test
After taking the test, check your answers with the correct ones that can be found under the files link at the bottom of this page under "intelligence test answers"
Are you willing to share your scores? What do think was the "point" of this test? Use this space to discuss your own views on intelligence and the theories you have been exposed to with regard to intelligences.
Ummm…whoah! I didn't do as bad as I thought, but I did some pretty good guessing. Which means that I had no idea…..It really does make me think about when my students take the standardized tests and the questions have nothing to do with their social upbringing and life experiences. They are at a disadvantage because they can not just whip out their cultural capital knowledge on questions and are often confused before they begin. This shows me how important it is to learn about my students and to find out the best way in which they learn and understand and how i can relate the material to real life experiences for them. I just remember this year when one of my students was doing an open response to one of the standardized tests - DCCAS and she raised her hand after much staring at the writing prompt and just asked…what does this mean? I don't know what they are asking…..And of course as a teacher, you really aren't supposed to say anything, but I did manage to replace one of the words with a synonym that she may understand and then a lightbulb went off and she started writing. So what does that show me? That on a standardized test where an abundance of points is based on one little writing prompt…it doesn't quite seem write that some students because of their background are at a major disadvantage because they may not understand the language or terminology.
This test was clearly a test of cultural knowledge, and not a test of reasoning ability, comprehension, or problem solving. Every one of the questions required some understanding of a particular context, such as how dice are constructed to different slang terms. Some of these contexts I had access to through my experiences, but some did not.
This test shows that so-called "intelligence tests" aren't always what they advertise. Some tests do a better job than others in testing for what they aim to — learning styles, general problem solving abilities, or reading comprehension. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of intelligence tests that, purposefully or not, have cultural biases embedded in them.
I guess the the important lesson to remember is that we always need to approach these things critically and skeptically, noting any cultural biases that exist and making choices regarding the test based on these. There are many different meanings of the word "intelligence," and we should just be careful and precise about which ones we are using at any given time.
I did not do well on this "intelligence" test! Personally, even some of the multiple choice answers didn't make sense to me. I think this reminds me of all the assessing that goes on in my classroom. Diagnostic, formative, and summative tests help build my curriculum and lessons structures. To me, this test was like a Pre test! I think the definition of "intelligence" is a very broad term. Perhaps someone is book smart but not street smart and vice versa. Who is the more intelligent one? Well, it depends in what context you are referring to! It all gets very confusing.
I got 5 out of 10 questions correct, and 4 of the 5 I got right were guesses. Pretty abysmal.
If this test were an example of an actual intelligence test given to students, potential employees, et al, it would be a lot easier to comment on its larger implications as far as intelligence testing is concerned. But since it was specifically designed for this forum, I'd argue that it's kind of irrelevant apart from being a "table turning" exercise on how it must feel to take a culturally biased test.
IQ tests and the like do put some at an advantage because of their cultural background. However, they are not specifically quizzing people on that cultural knowledge. ie, Let's say that, on an IQ test, there is an analogy that says, "boat is to bow as car is to -—" That question is going to be a heck of a lot easier for someone who's spent some time on boats. The question is not, however, asking you if you know what the bow of a boat is. It's asking you to make a comparison, which is a higher-order thinking skill indicative of aptitude.
The test we were just asked to take, however, was quizzing for specific cultural knowledge with no higher order application. It's the equivalent of a test asking, "The front of a boat is the -—." Some might argue that IQ tests are deliberately engineered so that some test takers will get so tripped up on the culturally-contingent information that they can't get to the higher-order skills. While this (sadly) wouldn't particularly surprise me, I haven't done enough reading on this to say to what degree this happens. What I do feel comfortable saying is that IQ tests, etc, are not composed of "white culture" knowledge questions. I think it would be a lot more illuminating to look at an actual "intelligence test" and analyze the biases that do and don't exist within it, and how the biases that do exist are manifested.
Echoing what several before me have said, this intelligence test was an eye-opening experience. It was fascinating to experience what it feels like to take a test for which I had almost no cultural knowledge base. Because I was unfamiliar with terms within the test, I ended up having to guess on many of the answers. It was comforting to know that I was taking this test as a way to experience this kind of intellectual shift and not, as our students often experience, in the context of a high-stakes testing situation. (Although do feel it's important to point out the the DC-CAS is not an IQ test but is a content-based test. It measures students ability to read/do math on grade level based on grade-level standards established by the district. It is not a reasoning test or an IQ test.)
However, I do agree in part with Jess' statements above. I looked at a few supposed IQ tests (which, as I'm sure we know, may or may not be valid). Most of these questions typically ask the test-taker to compare things, determine patterns, or to use quick thinking to figure out various computations. While there are clearly some issues with cultural bias that can be found in these questions, I don't think that the bias was quite as obvious as in the example intelligence test provided here.
Wow! I will have to concur with everyone else thus far; I got a 5/10 (4 more than I thought I would get correct) and none of those five were the one answer I thought for sure I had right! Clearly, if you were exposed to the cultural context/content of these questions they might appear to be easy or reflect every day knowledge, and if you weren’t’ you wouldn’t have any more than a one in four chance of getting and particular question correct.
Intelligence tests are supposed to be samples of problem solving abilities and learned facts. Many rely on IQ tests as good predictors of future learning and academic success. One problem with these tests is that there is a large verbal component in them which is unfair to ELL students or students who have learning differences related to verbal skills or processing. Some IQ tests have memory components to them as well which, when given under timed conditions, really test processing speed (how that reflects intelligence is unclear to me). My main concern with IQ tests and how they are used in education is that they can’t determine factors such as motivation, curiosity, creativity, work habits, study skills, parental investment, and other things that often impact a student’s success far more than raw academic talent. There are several students in the world who, according to an IQ test, are gifted and fail or drop out of school. These students don’t find their fate because they aren’t intelligent, but because of other factors such as being lazy, they’re bored, they don’t have appropriate teachers, they are afraid of being bullied by other kids, etc.
IQ tests don’t cover many of the areas discussed by Gardner in his theory of multiple intelligences, nor has everyone in this realm of Psychology (or Education) even agreed upon what “intelligence” really means. I have sat in IEP meetings centered on the “confusing” results of students’ IQ scores before that seemed silly to me at the time. One student had a very high IQ and was failing many of his classes, withdrawn from participation, and prone to outbursts. This particular student, who some labeled as problematic and academically behind was actually extremely smart and just in the wrong environment for someone with his condition (Asperger’s Syndrome)-the gap between his IQ and his grades had nothing to do with his academic abilities. Another student’s IEP was almost completely designed around her lower than average score on a Stanford Binet IQ test, when it came out later that many of her academic performance issues were due to traumas faced outside of school and almost nothing to do with her actual abilities.
While IQ tests can be informative tools which support other factors of learning and development, I have strong reservations about just how much weight they are given in a classroom. I believe that hard work will take any student farther than raw talent- as determined by any kind of standardized exam.
great discussion here about intelligence! i wonder if others might also want to address the degree to which culture can influence the results on intelligence tests such as these?
When I took this test, I got the feeling that some of my students would have known a few of the answers I didn't. Mostly I was thinking of the questions that obviously stemmed from some sort of slang. Granted, I can't assume that the particular slang used for the questions was familiar to my students, but it got me thinking about access to cultural experiences nonetheless. Here's what I mean.
My students obviously live in a culture different from mine, and it's apparent in many aspects of our lives. One very clear aspect is language — they have sayings, expressions, and words that they use naturally every day which, before meeting them, I had never heard before. Likewise, I use many expressions that are completely foreign to my students. However, by interacting with them and their community for about two years now, I'm starting to pick up on many of the language pieces unique to their culture, and they're beginning to learn a few of mine, too. Yet, while I now know what "joning" and "being pressed" are, among other things, this is just a small sliver of the whole picture. Despite having access to their language system, I still only have a fairly limited and artificial access — without actually living the culture, and being raised within it, my knowledge of cultural details remains small. The same goes for my students.
My point is this — even if we try to let our students in on the cultural secrets of our dominant culture so they can perhaps succeed on standardized tests, they'll still be at a disadvantage because they don't live in the dominant culture. Unless "intelligence" tests don't reflect the dominant culture, but instead are tailored to every individual student's own culture, students who don't live in this dominant culture will necessarily do more poorly. There simply isn't a substitute for experiencing a culture first-hand.
Wow. I did terrible. I would like to second the feeling that some of my students would have done better than me on this test. I don’t know where it came from, but as others have said, it is clearly more a test of culturally specific knowledge rather than comprehension, problem solving etc.
Although cultural knowledge is clearly a factor when taking tests like the one posted, what I find more interesting are the more subtle examples of cultural bias on tests that are at least trying to disguise themselves unbiased. For example, a member of one of my graduate classes described a math problem that she designed involving whether it was cheaper to buy a week bus pass or to pay for a certain number of individual fares. I forget the actual wording/numbers used in the problem… but the basic idea was that the teacher thought that the individual fares option was cheaper by doing simple math… but several students thought that the week pass was cheaper because - as they reasoned - a whole family could share the pass. Apparently the students were savvier with public transportation than the teacher.
The point is that these biases pop up in places that you would never expect. We can do our best to design questions that we think unbiased… but I think the better option is to never rely too heavily on “intelligence test” to judge the ability of our students.
Hmmmm three out of ten - not so hot. My students would be so upset with me, please no one tell them about this - seriously it would DESTROY my reputation for being cool and with it. Okay I actually don't know if I have that reputation or if I only think I do because I'm one of the "young ones"
Anyway, I think it is interesting that I feel really embarrassed and ashamed by my low score on that test - it has been a long time since I did that badly on anything and it was good for me to remember just how my students must feel when they do poorly on any type of assessment, be it a content test in my class, a standardized test, an "intelligence" test or even something small like a homework assignment.
I mean come on, I actually have a kinda weird sinking feeling in my stomach because I didn't do well on a that test was designed to make me think about the cultural biases in modern intelligence tests and not actually to measure my intelligence - I think. Still I want to say that I believe that the test I took did measure a very real and valid type of intelligence - a type that I clearly do not have . I even know why I don't have it, I've hardly ever been exposed to any of the vocabulary on that test, but I know my students have - and I bet they would do well on it. In fact I think I will give it to some of my summer school kids tomorrow - I'll let you know how they do.
So I gave the test to 8 students today and got some pretty surprising results. They did as poorly or more poorly than we did! All 8 students scored between a 1 and a 4 and they shared some of our same sentiments. They all told me that the test did not seem like a fair test of intelligence, but actually become enthused about doing poorly on what they considered a silly test. One student told me that the phrases on the test were popular in the 80s and asked if he could have one to bring home to his father. The experience made me think about the misconceptions we have about our students. As I thought about it more, I realized that I didn't have a really good basis for expecting my students to do well on that test - I guess because the questions about MLK and Malcom X made me think it was some kind of test of African American cultural knowledge. I guess I should be more careful when thinking about my students and remember that I really can't know what they do and don't know until I actually ask - I guess that right there is the value of testing right? Actually knowing what the students know and not relying on generalizations and misconceptions to guide our decisions in the classroom.
this is very interesting — i'm so glad to hear you had a conversation with a group of students about this! i would hope that we could have more conversations with our students about the assessments they take! also, jkirmes, please make a "profile" as i'm not sure who you are.
I don't really think I felt terrible about doing poorly or well on the test. (It turned out that I did alright, I think about a 70%). The part that was most disconcerting was when I read the questions and realized that I had no context or idea what the answer might be. There have been a few times in college where I had this feeling of helplessness during a test and it was horrible. After the test (this one and the college one), I had already established the fact that I was going to do poorly and therefore only set myself up for the surprise of doing well.
I believe ours students must do something very similar in their classes where they feel like failure is going to happen. They have a predetermined fate so the results are not as painful for them when they get it back.
As far as determining "intelligence", the test seems pretty silly. Intelligence should be tied to cognitive processes not facts or concepts that rely on specific context or ideas. The ability to think through something shows intelligence.
I made a C-plus on this test. We talk about cultural bias in standardized tests, right? I think this test has a regional bias. I'm an African American from the Midwest who has lived on the East Coast for a number of years. But I'm guessing my relatives who still live in the Midwest would not have done as well as I did on this test. I like the idea of giving a test of this sort to teachers to help them understand how lost their students feel on standardized tests.
Last time I administered the DC CAS I did notice some blatantly culturally, well really socioeconomically, bias questions. For example, one was all about an orchestra playing some classical piece and to understand it you really had to know how to read music. The vocabulary was so dense that it was hard to infer what a crescendo was, or what they meant by forte, especially seeing as those words are Italian and DCPS doesn’t offer much in the way of music education or foreign language study.
It made me really mad because the test questions didn’t measure reading ability but knowledge of how to read music and musical vocabulary. This “intelligence” test however, didn’t do what it was supposed to do, as least for me. If the title was “standardized test” it would have proved a point but aren’t intelligence tests more about solving puzzles and reasoning abilities? I’m just not sure this mock intelligence test truly replicates a real IQ test. I would be interested to see a real intelligence test to be able to compare it to the type of standardized tests we are mandated to give our students.
Big fat F. That's what I scored. I seriously thought I would have done better based on my good guessing skills, but 4/10 is all I got correct. I am going to have to agree with what everyone else has said about how this was much more of a culture test. Although I could read the question well enough to understand what type of answer to look for, none of the choices were anything choice to what I would have written if it were a fill in the blank test. Similarly, I am sure some of my students have felt exactly the same when taking certain standardized test in the past. I have been asked several questions from my students during standardized tests that refer to the meaning of different words in the question or solutions. They explain the question clearly to me and understand what they are looking for, but often times the vocabulary is not relevant to what they have learned in school but rather what they should have experienced at home, and that is an unfair test for students from all different home environments. Liz Mickduff gave a great example of an inappropriate standardized test question using advanced musical terminology. This shows that there needs to be a greater diversity in test questions and that starts with a more diverse body of test question creators. A question like the one Liz mentioned should definitely not be a part of standardized tests.
I did not do as bad as I though I would. 6/10 I immediately recognized that the test was based on outdated urban African American slang which put me at a disadvantage even though I am African American. There were questions I could not answer even if I understood the question. I don’t eat meat so the chitlin question was impossible to answer.
I would like to point out that people had been exposed to some of the materials such as MLK Day is now a federal holiday and Jill Scott's first song was all about Candied Sweets. I bring this up because not standardized test are all about what students have been exposed to over the course of a school year.
Someone gave the example of the music question on the DC CAS. It seems that tests will always be culturally biased and that the best we could hope for is that test preparers recognizing that some of the questions are biased to subgroups of the population.
I guess I really cannot be considered "intelligent" because I can't even figure out how to get my score from the test, it just puts me at the SurveyMonkey site and even though I registered, I can't get my score…. BUT, I don't think I don't think I did very well There were obviously answer choices in each one of the questions that *looked* like the right choice if you weren't in the culture for which this test was designed. Those were all the choices I picked, which are probably wrong (But I'm not sure… which brings up the point that getting feedback on assessments is imperative to student learning experiences…. I really still don't know what candied sweets are, and even though I love Jill Scott, I still haven't heard the song Angela's referring to!).
The way I felt when I was taking this test, is this the way my students feel when they take intelligence or standardized tests? I wonder if there are any cultural biases present in the tests I devise? I try to make any situations I pose in my assessments to be authentic and relevant, but maybe my perceptions aren't even correct. In any case, this testing experience was quite an educable moment, and I wish I could see more examples of the cultural bias that is present in the standardized tests my students endure.
I agree with Emily and several of the other comments that while I think I get the point, to realize that what we think of as intelligence may in fact be a cultural bias or not measure actual skills, I would still struggle to call this an intelligence test. I did very badly on this, I know I've heard chitlins discussed before, they're part of a pig? I assumed that they existed at various levels of quality but again I never heard my students talking about the cheap versus the deluxe or high class levels of chitlins, my understanding is that they are all cheap but tasty and that's kind of the point.
I might call it a vocabulary test, but it did not measure my thinking process or my ability to reason. The SAT and LSAT, from my understanding are most similar to IQ type tests in that they measure thinking and reasoning but other than some vocabulary don't require any previous study, preparation or knowledge. While we know that KAPLAN would disagree, having taken those tests I did think it measured my ability on some level. I might call this an achievement test, which, like the ACT measures actual knowledge of grammar and language structures.
I do agree though, that this test points out that I am very unintelligent in what I'm assuming is African American culture. I wonder if what Emily, and myself too, would think of as everyday situations or common experience are not in fact the case. I know there are the obvious examples of stories about going camping or seeing snow or celebrating a holiday, but I was still surprised when teaching that I would make reference to a major news event or to even something, showing my complete stereotyping, like the Cosby show when talking about my family tree unit in class and had every student know the show existed but very few who had seen many episodes. Or as anyone who has seen "Borat" can attest, there's a lot we don't know about our own culture, a lot we don't want to know, and a lot of people who have real jobs and may be very "intelligent" on certain levels clearly lack understanding in other cases. I guess what I learned from this test is that learning is subjective, and we need to be clear what are goals and objectives are for our students. I believe being able to function in a society in which their culture is not mainstream, but there is a way to teach those skills without making kids feel unintelligent.
I would not call this an intelligence test. To me the term intelligence is not, or at least should not be, an indication of how well you know cultural terms. I fully realize that this extends to not testing students on facts that may seem mainstream to most or part of the majority culture. To me an intelligence test should test how well you problem solve and analyze new problems and information. This was, just like Jeopardy is, a trivia/culture quiz. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Jeopardy master, but I don't think that makes me any more intelligent than someone who is awful at Jeopardy. Its a matter of knowing certain facts and that comes down to exposure. Yes I do think that we have a responsibility to expose our students to a wide variety of experiences, situations, and facts so that they have a global awareness. However in crafting an intelligence test, the purpose should not be to test factual recall.
It is also important to realize the difference between the test that we all took (and for the most part, myself included, bombed) and the bias that exists in standardized tests. I am struggling to explain clearly what I mean so bear with me. The test that we took was bias in a different way than standardized tests for the most part are. Our test was explicitly bias. The content itself is culturally explicit. Standardized tests have many types of bias but many instances of bias are implicit. For example on a standardized test you may have a math question that centers on the content objective of having students find the missing side of a triangle but the question may be placed in a real world situation like a farm that students may not have a working knowledge of. This inability to visualize and understand the situation would prevent the student from understanding what skill is needed to solve the problem. However if the content objective was not in the context of the farm, most students should be able to answer the question regardless of cultural exposure. This situation was not the case for our intelligence test. We were asked questions that were not situated in ways we didn't understand, rather we did not understand the content being tested. I believe that standardized tests, because of the insidious nature of the implicit bias, pose a more dangerous threat to the way in which our society judges children because on the surface the test seems to be an accurate depiction of content knowledge whereas anyone who took our intelligence test would immediately realize that it requires specialized knowledge.
I agree wholeheartedly with Caitlin's comments. Test bias is only dangerous because people believe in the objectivity and validity of tests. That's why it was so easy for many of us to easily shrug off a 50 or 60 (…or 20) percent on the intelligence test we took. We knew that it was biased and we know that our results would never effect our ability to move on to the next grade or get a job. But that's certainly not the case for our students when they're taking high-stakes tests.
Hey Em - I couldn't get my score for a while either. Then I went to print one of the articles for another discussion and found that the intelligence test answers are attached as a word document to this page under the files tab. You have to grade yourself! Maybe you already figured this out, but just in case I thought I'd let you know!
I agree with the points brought by Caitlin, and would also add that think that different cultures not only have different languages,and contexts, but they also problem-solve differently as well. This may not be the best example, but ancient cultures did math in base 60 rather than base 10. The math works out the same, but most of us would have a difficult time navigating simple operations such as multiplication and division in such a system.
Now, as I said, this is not necessarily the best example - and of course people in southeast are not walking around using a sexagesimal system - but I think there could very well be slight cultural differences in the way are students were raised to consider problems and the way the majority of white, middle class students were. Perhaps they deal with problems verbally rather than by sitting down with a pencil and paper. Perhaps they are not as used to manipulating shapes or three-dimensional objects, etc. Just a thought.
Also, using the sexigesimal system, I scored a 0;30.
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