IQ Test Web Site
Dean Hickerson
> Hello,
>
> I put again my web site on the Net.
> You can find it at : http://nicologic.free.fr/index.htm
>
> There are many difficult IQ tests to measure the very high IQ.
> All tests are culture fair and completely visual.
>
> Have fun !
>
> Nicolas.
>
> P.S. My web site was called "Nicolas-Elena" before I changed of provider.
I've been having an email discussion with Nicolas about the questions on
his website. I pointed out that many of them have more than one reasonable
answer (as is common in intelligence tests), but he remains convinced that
his answers are better than mine. Perhaps he'd change his mind if more people
would point out ambiguities. How many can the rest of you find?
Here are some that I mentioned to him. To avoid introducing bias, I'm not
saying what answers he and I think are reasonable. (You can see his answers
by reading the Java code for each page.)
http://nicologic.free.fr/MatrixA.htm Item 16
http://nicologic.free.fr/Intrus.htm Items 4, 18, and 30
http://nicologic.free.fr/Classification.htm Item 15
http://nicologic.free.fr/MatrixB Example 2
http://nicologic.free.fr/Analytic.htm Examples 1 and 2 and
Items 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 24
(In the last page above, I agree with his answer to 24, but I don't think it
tests intelligence, just familiarity with something.)
Dean Hickerson
de...@math.ucdavis.edu
Mensanator
>From: Dean Hickerson de...@math.ucdavis.edu
>Date: 7/31/02 6:56 PM Central Daylight Time
>Message-id: <ai9tg4$db3$1...@woodrow.ucdavis.edu>
Of course it doesn't measure intelligence. And neither do any of the others.
The ONLY thing an IQ test measures is ability to get a high score on an IQ
test.
Dean Hickerson
>(In the last page above, I agree with his answer to 24, but I don't think it
>tests intelligence, just familiarity with something.)
Mensanator <mensa...@aol.com> replied:
> Of course it doesn't measure intelligence. And neither do any of the others.
> The ONLY thing an IQ test measures is ability to get a high score on an IQ
> test.
Agreed. IQ tests only measure certain aspects of intelligence. In this
case, all of the questions involve finding a pattern in a set of pictures,
so they only measure the ability to find patterns. My point is that even
within that context, many of the questions are flawed, since there's more
than one simple pattern.
This is, of course, a common problem with IQ tests: If you're good at
finding patterns you may find one that the test's author didn't think of
and therefore choose the "wrong" answer. Or you may see more than one
possible pattern and be unable to guess which one the author likes best.
This is particularly annoying because of the way such tests are often
presented: You mark your answers and then receive a score based on how
many you got "right". There's no opportunity to try to convince the
tester that your answer is as valid as the intended one.
In Nicolas's test, you don't even get to see which of your answers are
different from his, unless you take the time to look at the Java program.
So I'm hoping that other people will point out some ambiguous questions and
that Nicolas will change them, and make it easier to see what answers he
had in mind. At the moment he just thinks I have a strange way of looking
at things (which I don't deny), and that his questions are fine.
Dean Hickerson
de...@math.ucdavis.edu
Dean Hickerson
> I've been having an email discussion with Nicolas about the questions on
> his website. I pointed out that many of them have more than one reasonable
> answer (as is common in intelligence tests), but he remains convinced that
> his answers are better than mine. Perhaps he'd change his mind if more
> people would point out ambiguities. How many can the rest of you find?
Nobody has replied, so maybe I should be more specific. Can anybody explain
why the answer to Example 1 in
http://nicologic.free.fr/Analytic.htm
is "34", not "25"? (With "25", each zigzag has 1 more segment than the one
to its left. With "34", I don't see a pattern.)
And why the answer to Example 2 is "13", not "34"? (With "34" the horizontal
lines descend from left to right.)
Also, in item 16 of
http://nicologic.free.fr/MatrixA.htm
why is C to be preferred over B? (With C, the green circles turn and extend
counterclockwise in all 3 lines, while the red dashes go clockwise. With
B, everything goes in the same direction within each row.)
Dean Hickerson
de...@math.ucdavis.edu
Mensanator
>Message-id: <aj9pka$fno$1...@woodrow.ucdavis.edu>
>
>I wrote:
>
>> I've been having an email discussion with Nicolas about the questions on
>> his website. I pointed out that many of them have more than one reasonable
>> answer (as is common in intelligence tests), but he remains convinced that
>> his answers are better than mine. Perhaps he'd change his mind if more
>> people would point out ambiguities. How many can the rest of you find?
>
>Nobody has replied, so maybe I should be more specific. Can anybody explain
>why the answer to Example 1 in
>
> http://nicologic.free.fr/Analytic.htm
>
>is "34", not "25"? (With "25", each zigzag has 1 more segment than the one
>to its left. With "34", I don't see a pattern.)
>
>And why the answer to Example 2 is "13", not "34"? (With "34" the horizontal
>lines descend from left to right.)
I don't see the logic either. But "34" establihes a correlation between the 2nd
and 3rd box and the 4th and 5th box. It may be that no such correlation is
intended. Only between each pair of boxes, justified by the fact there is a gap
between each pair of joined boxes. I say this based on the other two examples
which do not seem to extend the correlation across all six boxes.
Alan
Dean Hickerson wrote:
>
> I wrote:
>
> Can anybody explain why the answer to Example 1 in
>
> http://nicologic.free.fr/Analytic.htm
>
> is "34", not "25"? (With "25", each zigzag has 1 more segment than the one
> to its left. With "34", I don't see a pattern.)
>
> And why the answer to Example 2 is "13", not "34"? (With "34" the horizontal
> lines descend from left to right.)
>
I agree with you entirely - It looks like he made 2 mistakes here. There
appears no sensible logic to deduce the answers he gave.
Chaos theory dictates that once an event has occured once, the chances
of it occurring again increase dramatically, and ditto for a 2nd event
making a 3rd nearly inevitable. In this case, a mistake, which indeed
recurred, casting doubt over all subsequent answers... (I digress...)
> Also, in item 16 of
>
> http://nicologic.free.fr/MatrixA.htm
>
> why is C to be preferred over B? (With C, the green circles turn and extend
> counterclockwise in all 3 lines, while the red dashes go clockwise. With
> B, everything goes in the same direction within each row.)
>
> Dean Hickerson
> de...@math.ucdavis.edu
I agree with the turn and extend theory...
In the whole diagram, dots turn and extent anticlockwise, dashes
clockwise.
If ONLY the 3rd line was present, it would indeed be amiguous which way
rotation was occuring.
Assume squares are numbered clockwise from top left 1,2,3,4
Position I : 1,2,3 filled
Position II: 2,3,4 and add a dash to 1
Position III: 3,4,1,2 filled, and add a dash to 3. = 'C', so I agree
with the author on this one I'm afraid...
Alan.
Boolbar
> I wrote:
>
> > I've been having an email discussion with Nicolas about the questions on
> > his website. I pointed out that many of them have more than one reasonable
> > answer (as is common in intelligence tests), but he remains convinced that
> > his answers are better than mine. Perhaps he'd change his mind if more
> > people would point out ambiguities. How many can the rest of you find?
>
> Nobody has replied, so maybe I should be more specific. Can anybody explain
> why the answer to Example 1 in
>
> http://nicologic.free.fr/Analytic.htm
>
> is "34", not "25"? (With "25", each zigzag has 1 more segment than the one
> to its left. With "34", I don't see a pattern.)
AFAICS it should be 25. I can see no logic whatsoever in the answer
34.
> And why the answer to Example 2 is "13", not "34"? (With "34" the horizontal
> lines descend from left to right.)
At first sight, 13 or 34 are equally valid answers for this. 34 more
so if the three pairs are part of a sequence. 13 if each pair is an
individual part of a group. Since the other two examples work as a
sequence, I would go for 34.
>
> Also, in item 16 of
>
> http://nicologic.free.fr/MatrixA.htm
>
> why is C to be preferred over B? (With C, the green circles turn and extend
> counterclockwise in all 3 lines, while the red dashes go clockwise. With
> B, everything goes in the same direction within each row.)
C is correct, for the very reason you give!
Boolbar
Dean Hickerson
> I agree with you entirely - It looks like he made 2 mistakes here. There
> appears no sensible logic to deduce the answers he gave.
Yeah, at first I figured he'd just made a typographical error, or maybe he
rearranged the figures and forgot to change the answers. But I mentioned
these to him, and he neither explained nor changed them.
I asked:
> Also, in item 16 of
>
> http://nicologic.free.fr/MatrixA.htm
>
> why is C to be preferred over B? (With C, the green circles turn and extend
> counterclockwise in all 3 lines, while the red dashes go clockwise. With
> B, everything goes in the same direction within each row.)
Alan replied:
> I agree with the turn and extend theory...
> In the whole diagram, dots turn and extent anticlockwise, dashes
> clockwise.
> If ONLY the 3rd line was present, it would indeed be amiguous which way
> rotation was occuring.
> Assume squares are numbered clockwise from top left 1,2,3,4
> Position I : 1,2,3 filled
> Position II: 2,3,4 and add a dash to 1
> Position III: 3,4,1,2 filled, and add a dash to 3. = 'C', so I agree
> with the author on this one I'm afraid...
The 'turn and extend' description applies to both answers B and C: In the
first row, dots go counterclockwise. In the second row, dashes go clockwise.
In the third row, dots go counterclockwise and dashes could go either way.
If they go counterclockwise you get B; if they go clockwise you get C.
So how do we decide? For answer B, the direction that a symbol goes depends
only on which row it's in. For answer C, the direction that a symbol goes
depends only on whether it's a dot or a dash. I just don't see that either
choice is so much better than the other that a person's IQ score should
depend on it. It seems to me that the most intelligent answer to this
question is "There's not enough data to decide.".
Here's another question that I find troublesome:
In item 30 of http://nicologic.free.fr/Intrus.htm, there are 5 vertical
dominoes, each of which has some horizontal and vertical lines in the top
half and some horizontal lines in the bottom half. Some of the lines in
the top halves cross each other; some don't. We're supposed to decide
which domino is not like the others. I can't see any really clear answer
to this one. Numbering the dominoes from 0 to 4 from left to right, I can
see that:
Item 1 is different in two ways: It's the only one that has no
uncrossed vertical lines, and it's the only one in which the number of
lines in the bottom is not equal to one plus the number of crossed
vertical lines in the top.
Item 2 is different since it's the only one in which the total number
of uncrossed horizontal lines (both top and bottom) is odd.
Item 3 is different, since it's the only one in which the number of
crossed lines in the top plus the number of lines in the bottom is odd.
Nicolas's answer is 3, but not for the reason I gave. I'm curious to see
if anyone can think of his reason.
Dean Hickerson
de...@math.ucdavis.edu