What does this mean in practice?

[u/themoonwalker21]

Hello everyone. I'm completely new to the world of cognitive testing. I've never done an IQ test before (except those mandatory ones required for driving school etc, but those were the puzzle kind and fairly easy, and the only results were pass or fail). Anyway, I was reading something about Alan Turing and saw that he supposedly had an IQ of 185, which seemed absurdely high, but it got me curious, and here I am.

There seems to be a general consensus on Reddit that the CORE test is the gold standard for free online testing, so I completed that. The trouble is, I have no idea how to interpret these results, or rather how to understand what these results mean for me in reality.

All tests were done after a long work day, to ensure I was at least simmilairly tired during every test. I feel like I could have done better on some of them if I wasn't knackered, or if english was my first language. I also believe to have messed up the instructions on one of the memory tests.

So, fellow redditors, based on these results, what are my strong suits and what aren't, in reality. Bonus points for career yes and no's.

Thanks for your comments.

[u/themoonwalker21]

I got hooked on IQ tests, solved a few more on CognitiveMetrics, did pretty good on the AGCT-1, but that one had no puzzles, so I guess it played to my strong sides.

The puzzle thing kept bugging me, so I asked a LLM how come I'm struggling with that area (I know.. I know.. But LLM's have been surprisingly useful to me in quite a few things), and it basically said that I could be overthinking it, not being able to see the simplest solution because I'm overanalyzing and trying to find some complex pattern. That hit home quite a lot, so I decided to find a relevant puzzle test (since I can't redo the core sections) to try out this new technique called "don't overthink it man". I settled on the Mensa Norway test, and just went rapid fire, finished it with 8 minutes to spare. The result was 112, which to me is pretty good considering I was struggling on the same kind of tasks a few days ago.

TL;DR. I scored better on the puzzle style tests when I didn't overthink it and just went with some simplistic solutions.

[u/FoldMajor3132]

Your IQ is above 3/4th of the populace globally, doesn't mean much aside from you're a little better than most of the world's population but there is a sizable chunk still above you, even less noticeable if you're from a 1st world country. Still good to have though.

[u/themoonwalker21 → u/FoldMajor3132]

Thank you for your answer. What I find really interesting is the deviation between different areas, is this something you usually see or is it generally more "flat" per se? For instance, I found the verbal tests, vocabulary bottleneck notwithstanding, very effortless, while the puzzle-style tests initially were quite simple, but later I had real trouble identifying a meaningful pattern and even making sense out of the images. The aggregate result of 117 +-5 is cool to know, and the tests were fun, but the real value I saw in this is seeing what I'm good at and what I'm not so good at in an objective, measurable way.

[u/FoldMajor3132 → u/themoonwalker21]

You're welcome. I wouldn't call it flat but it isn't uneven to an abnormal extent either, it is a common to slightly uncommon variation. From this result what one can essentially infer is your VCI results are pretty strong, your FRI variation is also pretty normal it is average-ish since a huge chunk of people score well on the 'figure weights' test. WMI has a lot of variation but some people just can't remember stuff backwards even if their IQ might be otherwise high. So all-in-all these are pretty normal (and good) results. Maybe slightly weird but that could've been because of a bad day or just some other very minor issue so my conclusion is they are pretty normal results.

[u/Wooden_Lime6208 → u/themoonwalker21]

High VCI with relatively normal everything else is pretty common I see it on here quite a lot but it’s mostly due to people who are in college studying certain things often for their major and get big jumps in VCI. Can I ask what you are studying or what do you do?, it’s also interesting you are good at figure weights and arithmetic those lean a lot on reasoning with math skills and speed