Testing the Nation
I’ve just finished taking the CBC Test the Nation IQ test. This is CBC’s latest foray into the world of reality TV. This time, the idea is not so much to see how smart we are or aren’t as a nation (although that’s a bonus, I suppose), but to toss out some stereo types of who is “smarter” and possibly to help debunk the myth of the IQ test being relevant to anything. You can take the test online at any time here and even print yourself out a copy to complete interactively when the show airs tonight (March 18th) while you watch 7 groups of professionals work on the answers themselves.
My results were almost exactly what I expected, but I found the test a little odd.
There’s a significant demographic section before you actually take the test which throws away a lot of the standard stuff, keeping only age and sex and adding things like number of siblings, birth order, hair colour, province of residence, handedness, whether you’re a night or a morning person, and so on. Two things I found irritating about the demographic info: you’re forced to choose your favourite spectator sport from a very limited list that doesn’t include “None” (I picked soccer because I watch my kids play during the summer), and you’re forced to pick your astrological sign from a list that doesn’t have either “Neon” or “Give me a freakin’ break” as an option. A separate and ongoing rant about sports, but why do sports fans assume the rest of us care? And why does astrology persist in the real world (also a separate rant)? What I did find entertaining here is that it asked you to estimate your IQ score.
Back to the point.
In addition to the standard questions of language, mathematics, logic, and pattern recognition (called perception in this test), there are two sections added: Memory and Visual Memory. I question these being two separate sections, really, even granting that some people find it easier to remember images than text and vice versa. The Memory section includes images and the Visual Memory section includes a Royal Canadian Air Farce commercial spoof (I won’t spoil it as it’s actually funny). But what I really question is the equation of memory with intelligence. This is the first time I’ve ever run across the assumption in an intelligence test - not that I’ve taken more than a couple of dozen across my entire life, probably. There are not very bright people with eidetic memories and incredibly intelligent people who can’t remember how to spell cat but can probably tell you more than you want to know about its behaviour or biology. My conclusion is that these sections were included to help kill the stature of the IQ test as the only way to identify how smart you are because they don’t really belong with the rest of the test. Feel free to argue.
The timing of each individual question is interesting, too, but I don’t think I like it. It basically equates all of the questions in a given section as being equivalently difficult, which is rarely the case and depends a lot on how your mind works. Pattern recognition with letters may be far more difficult than pattern recognition with numbers, or vice versa. But this departure from the standard timed test (where you have x minutes to do the whole thing and can spend your time as you like) probably has a less insidious reason (or maybe more… hmmm): television. It will add dramatic tension to every question on the show. “You have ten seconds starting… now!” Or 20, or whatever. Then add the countdown buzzer. As if the stress of taking an IQ test on national television isn’t adequate.
And let’s include the standard cultural biases, as well, giving them a Canadian slant. Hockey pucks (again this equating hockey with Canada - irritating), Mounties, and so on. Don’t forget to read a dictionary before the doing the language section - well, it’s not that bad, but it includes a lot of words you won’t generally hear in every day speech, but that’s not really unusual for an IQ test, is it?
So it’s an odd test.
It’s also a BBC creation, adapted by the CBC. Yes, once again proving that we can’t be bothered to fund our public broadcaster sufficiently to come up with its own original programming, instead it continues that great Canadian tradition of borrowing ideas from the broadcasters of other nations and Canadianizing them.
Ah well, onward and in a generally higher if not exactly upward direction. The link to the test is in the first paragraph if you’re curious.
