Just took an IQ test

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Yesterday, I took the IQ test, WAIS-IV, to see where I'm at. Last time I took an IQ test was when I took the WISC-III back when I was 15; 113 full scale IQ, 131 verbal IQ, 93 performance IQ (that last part ouch) I did not take any of the optional subtests, but some of the new subttests were interesting and would seem to boost my performance IQ, since the dratted Picture Completion and Picture Arrangement were not among the subtests I took. I thought I did well on both Visual Puzzles and Matrix Reasoning (and rather enjoyed them), as well as Block Design (which to be honest did make me a little nervous). I'm wondering how I did on Symbol Search and Digit-Symbol Coding, as the Processing Speed Index had generally been my worst area. I seemed to do OK on Digit Span, I think with a digit span of 7 (she stopped when she read 8 numbers and I couldn't read them all back to her), a backwards digit span of 4 or 5, and a "sorting" digit span of 5.

I don't have the results yet, but the proctor'll call me back in next week to go over the results with me. I'll post 'em here as soon as I am able.

a digit span of 7 is average. your verbal IQ is almost genius level. I also wouldn't be too upset about the 93, which is also about average.

131/93, huh? Heck of a verbal/performance gap. Typical of autism, to have skills scattered like that! I'm surprised they felt comfortable giving you a full-scale score at all. As it is, there's not much meaning to it.

What you can learn from that, is mostly that you can't judge intelligence by a single number, especially not when you've got such extreme strengths and weaknesses.

When I was a kid, I had a verbal/performance gap that was pretty big. I'm not sure exactly how big, but it was big enough that it surprised the tester. Nowadays, it's smaller. I wonder if yours will have closed, too?

When I took the WISC at age 15, in 1976, I obtained a 150 Verbal, 90 Performance.

As an adult, taking the WAIS, I've evened out: 120 Verbal, 104 Performance on my last test.

I took an IQ test. Don't remember the details exactly, but I had IQ beyond the average child; I was just bad at talking.

hm, for me was complete opposite when I took it as a child. verbal was bad, but then again, I had horrible anxiety; performance (or however you call it) was quite high.. wonder if I got more stupid over the years

You're probably okay, Cannotthinkoff. You're a graduate student in physics, after all!

That, and depending on an IQ test to tell you whether you're smart is kind of silly anyhow. Just spending time in school, learning and solving problems, will raise anybody's IQ score. Innate talent makes learning easier--but the actual learning the skill has to be done through practice, and the skills you use on IQ tests are no different.

This idea that IQ is unchangeable and you're born with it... it's silly. It's as though we didn't learn from our early environments, as though our brains didn't adjust themselves to the things that we require them to do in our particular cultures.

Give me the right training, and I'm pretty sure I could learn to ceiling out any IQ test you pleased. And that's not because I'd be smarter somehow; it'd be because I'd have practiced.

meh, it's overrated im pretty sure i couldnt score high these days

maybe iq tends to even out a bit

OP, you and I have almost identical scores: my FSIQ is 111, verbal IQ is 134 and performance IQ is 94; Asperger's is partially differentiated from autism in that aspies have higher verbal than performance scores, and autistics have higher performance than verbal scores, generally.

When I was working on hacking Super Mario Bros. 3, I also hacked the machine code. I would write out the instructions in 6502 assembly, and then using a guide to convert the instructions to the correct machine code op codes, namely the "6502 Instruction Summary," which can be found here:

http://nesdev.com/

I printed the TXT file out, and for every instruction I would refer to the printed copy. Only for a few addressing modes of LDA (load value into accumulator) and STA (store value in accumulator in location in memory) and I think maybe also JMP (jump to address) and JSR (jump to subroutine, which when you reach RTS you go back where you were) did I ever trust my memory. (I did not want to make a mistake and use the wrong op code as that could have created a hard-to-find error.) So it was thorough back and forth checking as I entered each instruction into the Hex Editor I was using (XVI32). I thought I became rather good at it. On the surface it looks grueling, but I actually had a lot of fun doing it.

How is this relevant? This task seems to be similar to Digit-Symbol Coding, where the instruction name and addressing mode served as the digit and the op code served as the symbol (what it needs to be coded as), while of coursing making sure 16-bit addressing mode was done in little-endian order (least significant byte goes first).

So maybe my Coding score will be better than it was in the past from all this learning (where I scored a 5 at 8 and an 8 at 15)? Perhaps even above average? One thing I noticed while testing, and maybe the examiner did too, was that I did not memorize any of the digit-symbol correspondences, but would for every single entry look up at the key and then back down to the box I was at. That might have slowed me down, but it was a habit that may have been built from my manual assembling, or maybe I was always like that.

I proctored my mum on a related test, the Symbol-Digit Modalities Test (which is where you put in the digit instead of the symbol), and she remarked to me that same mistrust and disregard of her memory, so maybe it's inherited.

I took an IQ test recently as well, but they didn't tell me my actual IQ. I know that my verbal IQ is in the "upper average" range and my performance IQ is average, but a bit slow. My digit span was a bit below average. I had quite a bit of brain fog that day, so I don't think that test was very valid. Apperently my IQ was above average when I was a kid. My stupid brain fog has made me stupider. Hopefully my IQ will get higher as my brain fog clears away.

it seems to depend on whether autism is 'flavoured' by intelectual disability or not, as was told mine is equaly very low in both performance and verbal,last had it tested in november.

This was similar to the IQ result that I got when I was 6. 138-150 Verbal IQ, 87-98 nonverbal. 120 overall.

KoR's results show the invalidity of IQ testing for people with autism. She's obviously not "very low" intellectually nor performance-wise. It's obvious the autism interferes with test performance overall. Would you ageee, KoR?

I would say that performance on the IQ test simply isn't as reflective of talent and intelligence as people say it is.

That, and don't underestimate people with low IQ scores. The idea that "low IQ" means that somebody can't think, can't learn, can't do useful things--that's total bullcrap. Of course they can. They may take longer or do things differently, but that's a lot like with autism in general--we do things differently and take longer, too, even if we're good at IQ tests.

IQ tests are not useless. They do represent a sample of your performance on a variety of simple tasks, and they help gauge what you can do in those areas. However, I do not like applying them globally, as people seem so wont to do nowadays.

I don't like the practice of saying that an autistic person with a low IQ score must "really" have a high IQ, somehow. It feels too much like saying, "I'm not like Those People with intellectual disability. It just looks like it. Really, down deep, I'm smart." I don't like that divide-and-conquer thing; it makes us all weaker and makes it harder for people to stick up for each other.