Defeating the IQ test

摘要

PEOPLE given instructions on how to succeed at a widely used type of IQ test end up with far higher scores than those who take the test without learning these tips beforehand - throwing into question the validity of these kinds of tests and contributing to critiques of IQ tests in general. That is the main finding of a study on "progressive matrices", a kind of IQtest that displays a series of changing shapes. The test-taker has to figure out which shape would logically come next. The most popular version, Raven's Progressive Matrices, has been around since the 1930s. In the current study, Benedikt Schneider at Saarland University in Saarbriicken, Germany, and his colleagues used a competing test called the DESIGMA-Advanced.