Does IQ truly measure your intelligence or is it just another achievement test, much like the SAT, with fluctuations in scores as you gain knowledge?
Maybe more the latter, according to a new study by researchers at University College London. Researchers show that IQs of a group of British teenagers fluctuate - sometimes by a lot:
The researchers tested 33 healthy adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 years. They repeated the tests four years later and found that some teens improved their scores by as much as 20 points on the standardized IQ scale.
"We were very surprised," researcher Cathy Price, who led the project, tells Shots. She had expected changes of a few points. "But we had individuals that changed from being on the 50th percentile, with an IQ of 100, [all] the way up to being in the (top) 3rd percentile, with an IQ of 127." In other cases, performance slipped by nearly as much, with kids shaving points off their scores.
Price and her colleagues used brain scans to confirm that these big fluctuations in performance were not random — or just a fluke. They evaluated the structure of the teens' brain in the early teen years and again in the late teenage years.
"We were able to see that the degree to which their IQ had changed was proportional to the degree to which different parts of their brain had changed," explains Price. For instance, an increase in verbal IQ score correlated with a structural change in the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when we speak.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/10/20/141511314/iq-isnt-set-in-stone-suggests-study-that-finds-big-jumps-dips-in-teens
Or they've at least forgotten most of their college years.
Various factors besides g contribute to IQ scores, some of which are quite pervasive and difficult to control for. Stereotype threat and cultural variations in IQ scores do not accord well with any theory of intelligence. An individual's performance appears more contextual than any intelligence quotient could ever measure. It is like trying to find the position of a subatomic particle.
And when you decontextualize the individual (and the subatomic particle) its behavior becomes sporadic. A child's performance on IQ tests should be considered in light of this and what kind of intrinsic motivators and demotivators are affecting the child's performance. I think, most of us are trained to think we are less capable than we actually are and thus withhold effort. The reason for this is that displays of sophistication, especially in our modern society, tend to make people feel inferior, especially when people are of the attitude that they are incapable and so do nothing.
The child who takes a test thinking "I'm no good at IQ tests" or "I'm stupid" hasn't got a chance in hell of performing well. All kinds of cultural paradigms can feed into that, such as believing that technically minded and intelligent people ("nerds", "geeks", etc..) are unpopular or socially inept. Such a paradigm may encourage a child to withhold effort.
Just as the children's brains adapted to perform better on these particular tasks, the nutrients (Neurotrophins) that sustain the life of these cells cannot be given to them unless the cells are activated. Over periods of non-use the cells will atrophy and die.
Their performance is bound up in their practice of those tasks as well. A person's IQ score will steadily improve the more they take IQ tests. But that itself doesn't mean they can resolve an IRQ conflict, animate fluid physics in 3D, rebuild a transmission or perform open heart surgery. Those will need their own practice.
See: Hebbian Plasticity, Potentiation
I did it and it served me very well in my studies and in the military ;)
Also, it should be noted that the particular findings of this study can only be generalised to the target population of the test i.e. children between the ages of 12 and 13 years.