What's your IQ?

[urseberry]

Trekkie, what a candid and thoughtful reply. I too have often wished for a better work ethic. Of course, I also know people with both high intelligence and high work ethic, and the things they accomplish astound me.

 

[soocool]

I have no idea what mine is, but as long as I know my name and where I live, life is good.

My DD was tested in 1st grade and got into the gifted program, which in my and her opinion was worthless. Her IQ was around 142, but it was the spatial skills area on the test which she totally blew away and the school psychologist could not say enough about this area as well as her teachers. It was actually her preschool teachers who alerted me that she was truly exceptional in her spatial skills (I kind of figured that out on my own when she was completing 500+ piece puzzles at age 3 and building theme parks out of legos at age 4- 5 with concessions stands and parking garages). However, in elementary through high school the "gifted" program" was a social studies class called Humanities and when it came to grading they gave it a bit more weight. In 3rd grade she was also tested for a gifted Math Program in which she was the only girl who was accepted. She was pulled out of her regular math class once a week for this specialized math class in which the students competed in the Math Olympiads.

The problem with school was that DD was not taught to use her spatial reasoning and she was ultimately bored out of her mind and had to work extremely hard in subjects that did not emphasize her talent. She disliked English and struggled writing papers, though she scored highly on the SAT verbal and writing portions (over 700) s, but she breezed through BC Calc and AP Chem, Bio, and Physics. She is currently completing a 5 yr PharmaD program in 4 years and was given a STEM scholarship.

So when it comes to IQ, focus on your best skills and ignore the numbers. I wish the schools would learn to do this and perhaps kids would not struggle as much.

 

[mohsin95]

Not that commonly, it's mainly used by schools to test students to see if they'd do better in advanced streams (that's what happened to me 146). SAT results typically correlate more with IQ than grades, and every college bound student in the US takes the SAT.