Intelligence Defined
According to a new study:
Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to “self regulate” or focus on the task at hand.
In all modesty, I have never met someone that comes even close to rivaling me in my ability to remain focused on a task.
The GRE is setup in a way to penalize me for my assiduousness. By allotting only 96 seconds to solve a problem one must move so quickly through the problems they are unable to focus on any one problem in a substantial way. Given this new study, my poor performance on the GRE is actually an indication of my intelligence. Accordingly, graduate schools don’t reject me cause I’m not intelligent, in point of fact they reject because I am intelligent.
All joking aside, from what I can tell, intelligence is most commonly used as away to describe someone that can rephrase what you say in a fashion you are likely to agree with. One will get bonus points if when rephrasing they incorporates more technical words so long as they are not so abstruse that the original speaker does not know their meaning.
This definition of intelligence makes sense when one examines standardized tests. While standardized tests have multiple answers there is only one correct answer. For the test maker, the correct answer is the reformulation that most closely resembles the question. And who judges which of the answers is the one that most closely resembles the question? Why the test makers of course. Just like a speaker that thinks someone is intelligent based off their ability to reformulate what they say, the test maker of standardized tests judges your intelligence based off your ability to identify that answer they think most closely resembles the reformulation of their question. In a standardized test there are no intrinsically correct answers. Only answers that are extrinsically evaluated to be more related to the question than the other answers.
Has anyone ever taken a standardized test by a bunch of test makers who believed themselves to be stupid? I’m guessing not. Unsurprisingly, people who consider themselves intelligent are the ones that develop intelligence tests. Theirs just one slight problem: their standardized test only measures other people’s ability to see what the test maker believes is the closet connection between question and answer. The system becomes self-selecting. One’s intellectual capacity is measured as a function of their ability to see connections that ‘intelligent’ people can see.
When my family gets together for holidays we spend most of that time joking with each other. Many of my father’s jokes are extremely abstruse. Having lived with my father for many years, and being imbued with many of the same genetic personality dispositions me and my brothers are usually able to discern the meaning of his jokes. Those not familiar with my father’s brand of humor are left out in the dark until one of us can translate for them. If my father decided to create a standardized test with the purpose of measuring intelligence his three children would set the upper portion of the scale. We would rapidly and quickly see those answers and questions my father most closely associates.
Questions are always asked in a context of the group of people asking the question. Standardized tests sit in the context of a small group of people that reformulate what you tell them in a succinct meaning that you assent with.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:14 am
“YOUR’RE WRONG”………
May 27th, 2007 at 2:26 am
and here’s why:
as the name already implies, a “standardized” test measures features in a standardized, across-the-population manner. Even though I get the point you are making, namely that you think that the sample of questions is chosen by the test-makers cause they think that those questions resemble best what they consider to be testworthy, I can rule that arguemnt out, cause in order to prevent that error from happening, they have already applied certain test-construction guidelines that will prevent that issues. Whereas the responding choices in the assessment of your dad’s humor are non absolute, the answer to an algebraic question are - so, the answer is totally independent from the person who phrased that question, so I think, this whole argument of the so-called “GRE-Mafia” somehow is a silly one.
Oh, I already told you about the different kinds of intelligence, didn’t I: Steve, there is an alpha-intelligence, where people see conncection between things and understand them, where connections DO exist in reality. There is that second kind where those connections are not seen, that’s stupid. Then, thirdly, when there is no connection between things in reality and you don’t see them, it’s also intelligence behavior, but the fourth, and, in my eyes, most stupid behavior is when, in reality, there is no connection between incidences, and you still see a conncection - and, at times, I get the impression that passages in your blog work that way…. No offense.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:28 am
but I’m sure it’s the corporate system that is at the core of all GRE-testing-dilemmata…
May 27th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
lol bettina. I generally agree, except that steve is right that it doesn’t help select for people who are very good at focusing on a hard problem until it’s done. That’s actually a really important skill that often gets overlooked because it’s rarely tested for. Being slighly ADD ends up being more beneficial for getting into college than it actually is once you’re there.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:21 am
So what is your score on the practice tests when you give yourself unlimited time?
May 29th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Good question. You can’t tell the computerized version to not time you so I can’t say. However i can say that i score consistenly higher (700-730) on the ETS written version. This is because i have much more control over the questions. Meaning i can spend more time on some and less time on others.
Same for verbal.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:49 am
All that interests me here are stats (well, stats done by the ETS, but still). I am sure, Steve is familiar with the data, but again - take a look.
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/04-05_factors.pdf
May 29th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
what does that mean? My comment is awaiting moderation?
May 29th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
THEY’RE AFTER ME………. oh my god
May 30th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Bettina
My point is not that they select based off of test worthiness but that the answer they select to have the closest association with the question is determined solely by their in group.
In the context of what my father is saying, one can easily say that what he means is absolute in the exact same way that the basic equation 2 + 2 means 4. There can be no doubt that in both cases their meaning is absolute in identical fashion.
This kind of argumentation goes back to the discussion on Pluto in which boose and Darwin argued that there is something out there that is being measured while I argued that such distinction are uniquely human and therefore necessarily arbitrary. As such I do not find the argument that associations between question and answer are independently true of human knowledge.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
your father’s humor is absolute within your ingroup, whereas the algeabraic equations are absolute well beyond that suspected in-group that selects the GRE-questions - and again, as I said, I understand your point - the group that poses the questions assumes that there is a shared pool of responses, and the more closely the target group resembles the test-constructor-group, the better the result - that’s your hypothesis. But honestly - that’s no explanation of your everlastingly moderate scores? How could your argument explain it? I don’t see it?
again - Steve - the GRE, over time and subjects, is a highly reliable and validated instrument - and I would throw my own work and career in the ditch if I would state otherwise. I may argue, as you do, the usefulness of the application of it, as well as the means of application, but I will not argue the construction of the test and the collection of items, cause that’s no rocket science and in-group-selection, that’s test theory and stats.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
oh, did I say, that here, in Germany, your hate-state, we do not make use of the GRE as an instrument of being admitted to higher education. How does that fit into your picture? The admission to an institution of higher education is based SOLELY on the grades that one has achieved in “Gymnasium” (comp. to High School) - and SINCE we still have a high predictiveness of grades here (meaning, that grade-inflation has not proceeded that far yet that an “A” is an everyday grade with no distinctive ability), one can truly rely on that measure. Once your GPA is beyond a certain cut-off, you have to wait a year, if it is even lower, you have to wait two years, and sometimes, you do not get in at all.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
in other words - if you guarantee a minimum of generalized performance control and if you guarantee that grades truly indicate what they should indicate, then, a GRE is simply unnecessary.
June 4th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Do you actually think that there’s a strict dichotomy between something being “independently true of human knowledge” and being “necessarily arbitrary”?
It seems like, if that’s your definition of arbitrary, and you’re going to say that every fact, idea, and thought a human can conceive of is dependant on human knowledge, then the word ‘arbitrary’ isn’t very useful.