University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

https://planning.e-psychometrics.com/test/icar60

by indigodaddy • 11 months ago

106 204 11 months ago

planning.e-psychometrics.com

iammjm• 11 months ago

Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.

qgin• 11 months ago

Or is that message the first challenge of the test...

tux3• 11 months ago

The site seems overloaded at the moment, but if the URL is any indication, this seems to be the ICAR 60: https://icar-project.com/

thimkerbell2• 11 months ago

Though the sample tests there are behind a login page.

jonplackett4• 11 months ago

Man my cognitive abilities have tanked since I was in my 20s. I remember doing IQ tests and scoring 130+

I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!

Anyone else feel like they used to be so much quicker?

indigodaddy2• 11 months ago

100% - used to be so much sharper with math and abstract math concepts in my 20s and 30s. Could be just a use it or lose it thing though?

mettamage• 11 months ago

In part. I notice when I do math again, it comes back.

BlackjackCF• 11 months ago

Do you think it’s really the fact that you were younger or just that you have a lot more responsibilities now?

I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s

I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.

They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.

I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.

aDyslecticCrow9• 11 months ago

I think i would really enjoy a refresh course for university level maths and physics. But perhaps it would be better spent learning new maths and physics, which force a refresh on relevant prerequisite maths.

thimkerbell2• 11 months ago

Is this a test whose abilities would survive being retaken periodically? Because having a baseline to compare against would let you know if your cranium was headed south, or if particular circumstances were contributing to that.

(my 2¢: avoid sugar, fast food& other carbs, nitrite meats)

tshaddox3• 11 months ago

I think it’s mostly about your level of interest in taking the test. This can obviously be influenced by your priorities and other responsibilities. Incidentally, I think IQ tests and similar “cognitive tests” are all mostly just measuring the subject’s interest in the test.

mothballed2• 11 months ago

It cannot be understated how much kids interrupt the ability to focus on tasks. The ability to do nothing but focus on solving on a problem for a week straight felt like 100x the productivity of having to totally context switch at the end of the day to someone needing a juice or going into a screaming tantrum because the color of the cup is wrong and that being non-stop until the next work-day, which totally obliterates all the short-term working memory you had of the task at hand.

mr90210• 11 months ago

You describe it as if it’s a bad thing. It’s your brain working as intended.

Now, you can be strategic about staying sharp about topics that interest you.

abstractbill• 11 months ago

It’s your brain working as intended.

As intended by whom?

channel_t• 11 months ago

Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.

rmah• 11 months ago

I'm in my 50's and I feel smarter than I did in my 20's. I'm less energetic certainly, but I can focus better now. And I feel like my knowledge and understanding of mathematics, politics, economics, sciences, history, people, etc, is much better.

Joel_Mckay2• 11 months ago

If you work with some piece of software everyday for 10+ years... I guarantee you the Jr programmers will have a look of terror as you bring them up to speed in a project. Speed is a function of practice, and not potential cognitive gifts.

One just becomes hyper-specialized with age if you aren't careful, and don't explore new technology or hobbies. One Phd physicist I knew often said he was only an expert in Spoons, and while that probably wasn't really true... it did allude to the irrational competitiveness of the insecure. =3

Flere-Imsaho• 11 months ago

I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!

Are you me? I've been helping my daughter study for the 11+, and some of the questions I really struggle with (I'm 44). However if you look up the answers and see how the answer is calculated/resolved, it does seem like it's a case of just learning the method.

This does make me think that to pass the 11+ you basically need to pay for private tuition. We'll see how well my daughter does in a few weeks time (when the 11+ test is conducted).

Likewise with a lot of these cognitive IQ tests, if you know the method or tricks you can basically pass no problem... but I'm not 100% sure it means you're "smarter" than everyone else.

binary132• 11 months ago

FWIW, after I started treating sleep apnea my mental sharpness increased a lot over the course of about a year. (I’m 39)

SamPatt• 11 months ago

IQ is age-adjusted. Without the adjustment, it drops quite a bit.

Some cognitive abilities diminish more slowly with age (so-called crystallized intelligence), but unfortunately, fluid intelligence drops noticeably much earlier in life than most people would care to realize.

You just need to lean into what you know instead of solving novel problems. Or be comfortable knowing that it'll take longer than it used to. Typically, you can still arrive at a solution if you could have before, but you'll need to put more work into it. Sometimes, a lot more work.

- A homeschooling father helping with SAT prep

JCM9• 11 months ago

“Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.”

A Cognitive test struggling under load is ironic/amusing.

geekamongus• 11 months ago

"The entire test will take about an hour to complete."

Doesn't that skew things? That is a lot of time a lot of people don't have.

kulahan15• 11 months ago

No, not in any way. Ability to be present for a test does not have any bearing whatsoever on cognitive ability, nor does any test on the planet account for whether or not the taker is present.

tshaddox3• 11 months ago

I think the suggestion is that people who have less free time might be in more of a rush to complete the test, and that surely affects test results without indicating cognitive ability.

shermantanktop3• 11 months ago

I’m going to guess this is an economically comfortable person with lots of free time imagining that people less well off have none. To an approximation, that trend is surely true - poor people have less free time - but almost everyone can find time to do things they want to do. Would it skew results? Hard to say.

IshKebab4• 11 months ago

Ability to be present for a test does not have any bearing whatsoever on cognitive ability

The irony of making such a big mistake while discussing cognitive ability...

geor9e4• 11 months ago

To map the raw score out of 60 to a population (normalize) you would need to control for biases like free time. For example, with the cooperation of institutions, it could officially replace an hour of school or work. You can look up such normalization tables for this test.

griffzhowl2• 11 months ago

There's no time limit on the test either, so people could take arbitrarily long.

But it seems from what's written at the start that what they're looking for is correlations between the different types of questions, rather than scores across people

aDyslecticCrow9• 11 months ago

Its an modern open-source and collaborative resource of IQ style questions for research studies. IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential (spoiling its utility as a metric since the questions can be trained... setting aside its dubious usefulness as a hiring tool anyway).

It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.

fsckboy3• 11 months ago

i feel like a website like this goes against that

what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?

The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.

Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...

aDyslecticCrow9• 11 months ago

These tests serve no purpose outside of academic studdies. Distributing them for people to self-score sully their scientific value, and perpetuate their use for unsound usecases.

rasebo2• 11 months ago

IQ is limited because it only looks at one facet and it generalizes a lot. Tests that look both into ability and aptitude, and especially those who split them by domain are much more relevant and applicable to real world scenarios.

aDyslecticCrow9• 11 months ago

IQ does actually measure quite widely, but only one of many parts (the visual pattern matching part) is widely know outside of academic use. But even then it should not be used for hiring or intelligence scoring people against one-another.

If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.

anonym292• 11 months ago

IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential

Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?

It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.

The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.

The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.

aDyslecticCrow9• 11 months ago

IQ is meant for population statistics. For that purpose it's a great scientific tool.

socioeconomic status

No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.

A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.

You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.

ageedizzle• 11 months ago

The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.

I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.

tptacek7• 11 months ago

If IQ was one of the best predictors of job training success, it would be used everywhere. Instead, very few companies use it. There's a persistent myth that IQ isn't more widely used because of legal concerns, but that can't be right, because IQ and general cognitive tests are used by several of the largest companies (with the deepest pockets for discrimination suits) in North America --- and, further, the Griggs v. Duke jurisprudence that roots the myth doesn't have any force outside the US, where... IQ testing is not generally used in employment.

I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

I still do not understand why we are wasting scientific resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.

After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?

bofadeez19• 11 months ago

Psychometrics has clear value. Cognitive ability predicts academic/job performance (Schmidt & Hunter 1998, Psych Bull), and standardized tests reliably forecast college outcomes (Kuncel, Hezlett & Ones 2004, Science). Conscientiousness adds further predictive power (Poropat 2009, Psych Bull). The science is robust. The issue is the discomfort it causes, not lack of benefit or predictive power.

shermantanktop3• 11 months ago

Intelligence testing is not widely used in employment hiring, despite many attempts. Why is that?

gruez2• 11 months ago

resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.

"arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence" correlate very well with objective metrics like educational attainment and income.

the amount of harm that has already been caused?

Like what?

kulahan15• 11 months ago

It’s just more of that unbelievably annoying modern attitude that doing no harm is more important than doing good.

tshaddox3• 11 months ago

So is the goal to predict someone’s future income? Or to inform someone of how much money they supposedly should be making based on their test results and the supposed correlation between test results and income? Surely the test results aren’t being used anywhere to actually determine people’s income.

cm20122• 11 months ago

It is generally good to have an understanding of how the world actually functions.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

how the world actually functions

In a cruel and inhumane manner virtually devoid of all empathy and compassion for our planet, the life our planet supports, and for each other? I honestly wish I didn't understand how the world actually functions.

sctb• 11 months ago

In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes. They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive. In these sorts of contexts, it's not hard to imagine the utility in knowing someone's cognitive ability. It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes.

I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone. Of course, I could be mistaken. I wish administered the WAIS-IV on top of many other tests for an ADHD diagnosis.

They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive.

Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.

It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.

That's the part I believe I am clearly missing. These tests provide insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks better than one's history of already performing various tasks? It's not as if someone with a perfect SAT score takes an IQ tests and then is met with the sudden reality that they are mentally disabled nor vice versa.

What do these tests tell us that we already do not know? If I want to find someone with high mathematical abilities, then I would administer a math exam. Reading? Reading exam. Chess? Chess tournament. And so on...

aDyslecticCrow9• 11 months ago

On scientific front, it's very useful. Its use outside of academia is has however been very problematic.

There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.

Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.

This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.

bofadeez19• 11 months ago

You can create a proxy for IQ by simply asking a group of people to invent their own questions, summing them together, randomly sampling from those questions, and then rank ordering the outcome. High IQ people will score in the top percentile for any set of questions. That's the whole point.

hallole• 11 months ago

"Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves."

Yes, for the purposes of that research. Why would a comparison between two people be a flawed use case? Do you just mean the colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed?

codethief• 11 months ago

Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.

Isn't this what IQ tests literally do, given that they transform raw scores to a normal distribution for comparability?

isodev• 11 months ago

Because as a race, we’re curious. It’s a way to improve ourselves. Facing a challenge like this leads to learning, innovating new tools and techniques, greater understanding of how we are, how we work on the inside.

aerhardt• 11 months ago

There are plenty of benefits to studying it, and plenty of downsides to not studying it. I recommend “The Neuroscience of Intelligence” by Richard Haier from Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology for a comprehensive, accessible, and modern review.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

I think have read this before. Wasn’t he trying to find neuroscientific evidence to support IQ via neuron transmission rates and whatnot? Or was it grey matter volume?

Regardless, I am still skeptical of a lot of neuroscience research, as well.

I feel that neuroscience often suffers from the same issues that psychology does —- where correlation apparently equates to causation.

raincole• 11 months ago

If you view academics through this kind of lens most of them should be disband. Like practically everything outside of STEM. Actually 90% of math and science too.

A great part of science breakthroughs is mostly made by people who just want to know more, for the sake of knowing more.

riazrizvi• 11 months ago

It’s just a business, and it sells because institution leaders find it useful to have some convincing ideas to back up their positions, then the cottage industry it spawns defends it, and we all arrive in the world with established ideas like this in play. There are many little distortions like this in society that experience eventually puts the lie to. It’s the landscape to navigate, to play along with. A huge part of what makes a strong society is how many of us know what the game is, who can also put on a good performance of it. Imagine being in an improv group and people keep calling out that it’s pretend.

georgeburdell• 11 months ago

Long term programs such as Duke’s TIP have provided significant evidence that kids who score highly on the things they measure are correlated with high levels of professional achievement, such as patents. It makes sense to identify talented individuals and provide them with the resources they need to reach their potential

https://today.duke.edu/2016/06/whenlightningstrikestwice

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

Why wouldn't those children have such an outcome? Modern life is a series of gatekept outcomes. Perform well in early education => access to better universities, better universities => access to better experiences/careers, better experiences/careers => access to higher income, better income => ..., etc..

Who is more likely to have more time and the means to develop patents? The high income/high intelligence person who pays for others to do various chores, labors, and services for them so that they may focus on their work, or the people deemed unworthy by society who spend their time performing the chores, labors, and services for the high income/high intelligence person?

I believe intelligence alone is worthless, if not dangerous, without altruism and empathy. As I type this very message, somewhere in the world, there are people being torn to shreds, families destroyed, etc. by various contraptions designed by some of the most intelligent people on the planet. While unintelligent people may have less potential to change the world in a positive manner, it is apparent that those same individuals have less potential to change the world in a negative manner, as well.

Whatever potential these children have, I believe it's imperative that we are damn certain those children have the moral and ethical composition deserving of their potential, at least, that is my starry-eyed opinion.

alphazard2• 11 months ago

Whose life has actually improved for the better?

High-IQ children in low income families. In so far as they are targeted by social programs that give them better educational opportunities.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

So, without IQ it would be impossible for social programs to give better educational opportunities to exist? And on that same note, and this a genuine question, how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?

I'd be leery of anyone that claims that the only reason they were able to become a doctor, lawyer, etc. was because of being in a gifted program or something similar.

As far as I am concerned, I firmly believe the truly talented will create their own environment within reason. Take Von Neumann, for example. He was god-like in abilities. I am certain someone of his caliber did not need better educational opportunities in order to be exceptional. The man was, by all accounts, born exceptional.

Also, I am not certain that giving better educational opportunities to the bright is better than giving better educational opportunities to the disadvantaged, but I will admit I am likely too ignorant on this topic to have an informed opinion.

geor9e4• 11 months ago

I just think they're neat.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

Nothing wrong with that if you find personal joy in them.

rayiner2• 11 months ago

It’s not an arbitrary concept. It’s reliably measured and correlated with lots of factors we care about: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligen...

The benefits have been huge. The Chinese realized this a thousand years ago when they invented civil service exams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.

hirvi7422• 11 months ago

A lot of things are correlated. Let me know when causation is determined.

Also, your Vox link was pay-walled, but nevertheless, I am fairly well versed in some of the data. I have my own archive of research on this topic for what it is worth (not likely much).

Any hoot, the correlations, while positive, are nothing to write home about in my opinion. Sure, IQ might have more breadth of predictably, but it definitely lacks depth of predictably compared to more granular models depending on the domain.

For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.

avazhi2• 11 months ago

"You achieved a total score of 50! This means that you are 70% higher than 13351 participants who have completed the test. The percentile score is calculated on-the-fly. This means that your percentile rank may change as more people complete the test."

Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.

kirurik2• 11 months ago

The self-selection bias is definitely something to consider. I’d guess people who feel relatively confident in their intelligence are more likely to take the test.

zerr• 11 months ago

Many highly intelligent people might decide that it is not worth their time though.

mzajc• 11 months ago

Bear in mind that while most questions are language-agnostic, some require the knowledge of the English alphabet and definitions of uncommon English words.

webdoodle• 11 months ago

You might not want to give them your personal data. That's run by the same Cambridge that housed the Facebook scraping mechanism that was used by Cambridge Analytica to create personality profiles that got Trump elected in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Kogan_(scientist)

geor9e4• 11 months ago

No, Cambridge Analytica and University of Cambridge are not the same Cambridge. Neither is Cambridge Chip Shop or the dozens of other businesses associated with Aleksandr Kogan with Cambridge in their name. It's a city in England.

rcxdude2• 11 months ago

University of Cambridge wasn't exactly completely clean in this, though, given Aleksandr Kogan was a member of the university at the time that he did this, though how much visibility the organisation had of what he was doing is not clear.

abdibrokhim• 11 months ago

Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.

Joel_Mckay2• 11 months ago

"Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later."

Never have we seen a result so relatable to most users. =3

kaiwenwang2• 11 months ago

Pretty sure cognition is biological. I am of the opinion though various programs and college admissions accelerate a large portion of capable and able people to the top, they are not likely the best out of the entire population. I have frequently met (mostly young males) working in restaurants or supermarkets who would do exceedingly well if they had the right circumstances. Though personality (in terms of choosing to fight for an education) is important too: of those I offered to sit down and chat with (because their media landscape is mostly bad social media/conspiracies), none have taken me up on the offer. Whether due to their personality or my approach I do not know.

https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/intelligence.shtml

https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/hypothetical-foldy-ears-as-an...

caminanteblanco• 11 months ago

From your article, which claims that intelligence is reflected in how "foldy" your ears are:

Imagine that you know that you aren’t so smart. It’s difficult to do well in class. Then you hear of this theory, go check your ears in the mirror, and find that your ears are not so foldy. Maybe they’d feel relief at understanding why things are the way they are. They could then endeavor to do better for their kids and the next generation armed with the knowledge of prenatal nutrition and its benefits

What kind of crackpottery is this?

My personal opinion is that only people with these biologies are not Aristotle’s natural slaves, only able to live in the worlds of others.

This is the kind of fatalist intelligence eugenics that makes me recoil.

kaiwenwang2• 11 months ago

This is developmental biology: to recognize both inherent and natural limits but also to recognize the ability of humans to adaptively improve their surroundings for the better.

To say that everyone has the same level of skill and talent is harmful for people can clearly see their own ability yet cannot meet the expectations of society. If we believe everyone is the same, then it puts the culpability onto the individual to do well rather than society and government.

Aristotle reflected that king does not beget king, nor does slave beget slave. He thought some to be worthy and capable despite their lowly position in society. It comes from the book Politics.

geor9e4• 11 months ago

You achieved a total score of 55!

Oh no, I'm retarded

This means that you are 88.68% higher than 13391 participants who have completed the test.

Hmm

brookst2• 11 months ago

Well, that 88.68% higher than 13391 stat could still put you in the first decile if a few hundred thousand people have taken the test.

griffzhowl2• 11 months ago

>This means that you are 88.68% higher than 13391 participants who have completed the test.

But this makes no sense doesn't it? It looks like the intention is

"You're score is higher than 88.68% of 13391 participants who have completed the test."

What it's literally saying is that 13391 participants got a score 88.68% lower than yours

abalaji• 11 months ago

57. I got a ton of shape rotation problems. Figured out a strategy for those:

Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.

greazy• 11 months ago

I do not understand the shape problems. How are they solved? Does then pattern progress left to right, top to bottom? Or is that part of the riddle?

For the dice questions, which rotation on the is being performed? I think that's part of the riddle, most rotations are impossible given the initial position.

Either am an idiot or the solution to the riddles is something taught in school, which is something I've never been taught.

hoofedear• 11 months ago

Got a score of 33, scoring 36.5% higher than 13456.

No idea what that means but I no longer want to see another cube for at least a few weeks :P

camdroidw• 11 months ago

IQ scores perpetuate racism. True worth of a human being for a civilization is empathy and ability to cooperate. I wonder though if IQ has any impact on those

mikewarot• 11 months ago

What was with the fascination about rotated cubes?

Were we supposed to have scratch paper? I didn't use any.

I got 50, I guess that's good, especially because I'm ready for bed.

calini• 11 months ago

Don't ask me why but I did feel a tiny bit bummed out after getting 50 and being told I'm in the 68th percentile out of 13000~ people.

It's worth considering who the other participants are, has this been mostly shared just among University of Cambridge students / staff (and HN readers now)?

dave3332• 11 months ago

I scored 54 and while the cube rotations are painful to do I was sure of all my responses and wonder which ones I got wrong. There was one I didn't know the answer: somebody liked 96 but not 45 and liked 540 but not 250 - can someone spoil that for me? There was one that had a trick in the answer order - which was 4 letters on from T which is X but in the choices 4 after T was Y which was what I checked initially.

dave3332• 11 months ago

To SPOIL my own question now my brain has had time to work on it, the answer may be that the first digit is larger than the second digit for liked numbers and less for not liked, with the 0 digits irrelevant. So 9 > 6 and 4 < 5 and 5 > 4 and 2 < 5.

University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

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