me_irl

One could say he scored so high, it overflowed and wrapped around.

IQ tests, as I recall, are generally pretty decent at their originally intended purpose of predicting performance in the mainstream school system (at least up through high school, not sure about college), because the skills and knowledge it measures strongly overlaps with the skills and knowledge that match well with the current schooling system.

People have subsequently attempted to take this extremely limited and borderline circular usage (Do well on your IQ test? Do well in school. Do well in school? Do well on your IQ test) to be broadly meaningful, which is deeply flawed in a number of ways. And now, of course, there's attempts to update IQ to reflect a broader set of skills, which is sort of a step in the right direction but still fundamentally flawed in its attempt to reduce an incredibly broad set of different skills and areas of knowledge into a single number that you can rank on a scoreboard against others' like that's remotely meaningful.

And of course, by skills, I mean not just the things it's supposed to measure like math proficiency, vocabulary, etc., but also skills implicit to the nature of the test like focus, auditory and visual processing, ability to actually provide a definition for words vs. knowing how to use them but not knowing how to rattle off dictionary-style definitions, etc., all of which are also skills that are advantageous in our education system as it is currently structured but which aren't really a measure of other areas of intelligence.

Sadly, we as a society, at least in the Anglosphere that I'm familiar with, have a bad habit of prioritizing measurements that give us easy numbers to work with but don't really reflect reality that well over more complicated methods of assessment that might be more difficult to work with but actually work better.

nothing meaningful should be done to you, good or bad, just because of your iq

Yes, I went through this too, dumbest interview process ever but it had the positive result to make me look into how dumb a company canonical is and start using debian rather than Ubuntu. I call it a hard fought win

Whaaat...no matter the sale, I'd just go and leave with those abysmal requests. And I complained back in the day that an application had to include so much personal data already 😁

Yeah, at best, that would result in a whole lot of "I didn't dream last night" from me.

"I find beauty in silence." "Poetic but that's not really..." "Would you like to be beautiful?"

American (CA) engineer here, I had to take one of these for a job I ended up getting in 2012. It was for a big company too! They might argue that cognitive ability is directly related to engineering.

I actually do have a cognitive disability, ADHD. But I'm like a one-legged stripper... It might seem counterintuitive, but just watch me dance for a minute and then it will make sense.

I took a “personality” test in 2007 for my first job (union btw). Some pretty obvious basic questions that I imagine only a selfish sociopath would fail but maybe that helped filter at the time.

I can see the safety aspect. My wife has no spatial awareness. Almost every night or morning she is (while fully awake) turning over or stretching and smashing everything off of her night table.

Or if we are cuddled watching a show and she goes to scratch her nose she doesn't take into account where her arm my be in the embrace, or has even smashed me in the bottom jaw and clacked my teeth together trying to find her nose.

I would not want her anywhere near moving or fixed machinery, for her own safety and the company's "n days since accident" sign

I am legitimately struggling to figure out what grad school field has a spatial reasoning test. Civil engineering? Physical therapy?

I dislike organizational psychologists. The whole field. Every time a problematic hr department does something problematic using 'researched methods', the researchers all cry foul and say 'that's not how you're supposed to implement <policy/test>!' But do you not see your own role in legitimizing this behavior? All the research into how to run a happier bee colony is going to be used to justify mistreatment and discrimination by bad actors. Every test and every policy can be maligned, and providing citations just makes that easier. The research field is itself a tool for maintaining capital.

This is literally illegal where I live. There's a few exceptions like airline pilot, police or firefighter, but besides that it's considered discrimination.