Georgia NeSmith
2 min readAug 28, 2021

--

I'll tell you what I know about IQ and all other "standardized" tests.

You have to be taught HOW to take the tests. So often they are multiple choice, and there's a way to get "right" answers without actually knowing the answer. There will be two answers that are way out wrong, and two answers that will be close together but one will be slightly off. Picking what sounds like the possible answer will net you a "correct" more often that not.

And within those two lies the general problem. In many of the questions, both answers could be correct depending on how you turn the prism--that is, the perspectives you use. In perspective, one can be right. In the other, that answer could be right as well.

*******

And now once again I find myself pulled into a lengthy response that belongs on my own page. My ADHD leads me off in a good, often very unusual direction, in the process sometimes coming around to what someone else may have determined but I didn't know about, OR I go off in a verifiably NEW direction that either the test creators didn't know about because it was so new, but because my idea is in fact a new approach to that problem. More likely the former than the latter, but the latter often enough my own that, because currently, bc of multiple disabilities, I have been kept out of the system through which my work would be recognized.

So many times I've seen my ideas pop up several years after I came up with them. Well it's nice to find out that I was correct...but that doesn't fix my poverty problem.

My older brother presumably has a very high IQ, whereas I...well...I don't have any idea what mine is. I don't recall taking an IQ test, just being told my brother was smarter than I.

He EFFED UP in HS because he was too bored to do his homework. He did end up with a BS in economics after he got out of the Air Force & Vietnam duty.. (He was safe...not a pilot.) He then took some computer courses and ended up working at a very well known company, from which he retired with substantial sums of money.

Ultimately, at the age of 46, I earned a doctorate from the U of Iowa (Iowa City), and that's nothing to sneeze at. Plus I graduated with a near 4.0 avg between my MA & PhD. AND won my department's award for outstanding doctoral student in reserach two years into my program.

AND my ADHD brain starts flying off into the galaxy again. Sigh.

Profuse apologies for taking up so much of your space. I tend to run off at the keyboard. Now I need to "run off at the keyboard" on my own page.

--

--

Georgia NeSmith

Retired professor, feminist, writer, photographer, activist, grandmother of 5, overall Wise Woman. Phd UIA School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994.