What is IQ exactly?
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is one of the most studied and reliable psychological measurements, aimed at assessing human intelligence in a quantitative way.
IQ could be defined as someone’s intellectual ability and learning potential compared to the general population.
This means that your IQ score (your learning potential) is calculated by comparing your performance in an IQ test against the performance of the other testtakers.
IQ has been proven to be one of the best indicators of many important life outcomes, such as educational achievement, job performance or personal income.
What is an IQ test?
An IQ test is a standarized set of problems aimed at evaluating and quantifying IQ, or in other words, aimed at discriminating between different levels of intelligence/IQ.
How is your IQ score calculated?
Basically, what the aforementioned points mean is that your score is derived from comparing your performance (your correct answers) against the performance of others.
Can you increase your IQ?
This is a very discussed question. The scientific consensus is that increasing IQ isn’t possible. That IQ is fixed.
However, new evidence suggests otherwhise.
It turns out that there is one subintellectual ability that can be improved, and this intellectual ability, in turn, is the most important component of IQ or general intelligence.
This intellectual ability is spatial intelligence. Studies from the MIT, (and from many other important researchers), indicate that improving spatial intelligence is possible (indeed, it is the only intellectual ability that science knows for sure that can be trained) and that these improvements transfer to real life outcomes, such as performance in STEM, likelihood of dropout or grades.
If you have enough willpower to read an entire scientific paper, here’s a metaanalysis of more than 200 studies on spatial intelligence improvement and its effects. You will be surprised by how powerful spatial intelligence training is!
As also shown in these studies, improving spatial intelligence is not easy. The items of the stimulation exercises used must have psycometric validity, they must be based on proven models and there are many variables involved that must be controlled for.
How are IQ tests developed?
If you want to know more in-depth how IQ tests like the BAC (Brain Assessment Center) IQ test or the Raven’s progressive matrices have been designed, you can consult our validation process section.