A Little Background on Ability Testing

To Help You Better Understand Your Own Test Results (Maybe)

IQ tests, and other standardized tests we take over the years, are designed to “sort” people on a range of abilities. The scores, and the percentiles for the scores, rank-order our performance and compare us to a group of peers. The results tell us what proportion of the people who took the test did better or worse than we did. For any of this to have meaning, we need to know who the “peer group” was for the particular test we took.

Think of this: when we were in grade school and took those tests we had to take, we may have gotten mostly 99th percentile scores, or at least above the 90th percentile. I’m guessing that is true for you because you wouldn't have chosen to read this article if you weren’t that kind of person. Depending on where in that range we were way back in elementary school, most of us see our percentile results drop when we take tests such as the PSAT, the SAT, the Explore Test, and the ACT. Even more of us are likely to see our percentiles drop when we take the GREs or other graduate or professional school tests. I used to think the problem was that I’d simply become too much of a social butterfly during my teen years and “lost” my focus.

It turns out that, in many cases, we were simply being compared to a different group of people as we got older. If you were a “smart kid,” your early scores compared you to all of the children your age in school at the time. If you or your children took the Explore Test, the one that helps you plan your high school coursework, the one that gives smarter students a chance to take a test that has higher ceilings than the grade level tests, unless you are the most supremely intelligent kid around, you are not as likely to get any 99th percentile scores on the Explore Test. In a nationally normed sample of students, kids of all abilities, your score would still be 99th percentile, but not if you’re being compared to your true peers.