What Sometimes Make IQ Scores Hard to Understand?

or What Does This IQ Score Mean?

Earlier I wrote about What an IQ Score Can Tell You and followed that up with A Little Background on Ability Testing. Here is the next step to help you understand your own and your children’s testing on standardized tests over the years. Questions are welcome!

Different ability tests have different scales or ranges of scores. The ones you can take free online generally have a higher top score than the tests you can take individually with an assessment specialist or in school. You may have noticed that the test results tell you your score but they don’t put the score in context for you, they don’t explain how many people did better or what the score relates to in real life. That’s not very helpful or satisfying.

The original Binet scales intelligence tests utilized a ratio IQ score rather than today’s standardized ‘forced bell-curve’ scores. It was called an intelligence quotient. In the early years of intelligence testing, IQ was calculated by dividing the mental age by the chronological age and multiplying by 100 to produce a ratio IQ. Your mental age is the raw score you got on the test compared with the actual age of the others who took the same test. If your mental age is higher than your actual age, you will have an IQ above the average of 100. For…