1. I assume that you guys who talk about gifted kids having IQ's in their 140s or 150s..and law professors having IQ's of 180, don't exactly know how this IQ-scale is constructed. Basically somebody who has an IQ of 130 is ...better at solving the presented types of problems... than 98% of the rest of the average population..which means there's about 1 in 50 people like that..
If you take an IQ of 145 that means that person is better at solving the presented type of problems (ill go on by just saying smarter..) than 99,9% of the population...thus 1 in 1000....I dont know the exact numbers but thats how it goes on....so an IQ of 180..is pretty well.....my guess is it's one in a million....this IQ score thing doesn't work like meters or centimeters or years of age...its just a way to express how many people the person who took the test was able to outperform on the test....
2. The tests on the internet and on the TV shows are really sort of ridiculous...After all an IQ score basically just gives you a tendency of how intelligent you are by nature. It's just a tendency after all..whereas standardized IQ tests that are used by doctors and psychologist's to find out whether somebody is gifted or has ADD for example (the 'symptomes' are often very muhc alike as strange as it sounds) or whether somebody has problems b/c he's not very intelligent to put it mildly are fairly accurate (there usually aren't any big discrepancies on those tests if the same person takes different of those standardized ones). However someone might score 2 point less on this test and 5 more on some other (standardized) test, but basically it shows the same tendency (after all, it's not meant for people to be able to boast with their exact IQ scores like with **** size or whateva...).
The tests on TV and on the internet however are a lot less accurate...Somebody with an actual high IQ might score lower on them, because they put too much pressure on being able to solve the problems in a very very quick time, whereas the real tests focus more on being able to solve complex problems (without too much of a harsh time restriction)...so people who are good at solving things fast might have overrated IQs on those tests whereas other people might have lower IQ scores on their tests, than they should have....but that's just the tip of the iceberg...plus a lot of those tests on the internet or whatever generally tend to overestimate IQ scores, because...well people prefer to have their 'IQ' overestimated a little than underestimated...I remember there was this thread about an IQ test on my college discussion board and basically everybody who took the test had an IQ of 130 or over, which would mean that all of them were smarter than 98% of the rest of the population (whereas I knew 2 of them..and they were..well not just not good at school, but obviously not really smart in general)....So if you want to have your IQ estimated and want the result to be not waaay off, you better take a standardized test for which you'd usually have to pay unless you have problems b/c of which something like that needs to be done....
3.
Well does it? How important is it in real life? Are people with higher IQs always successful and are people with lower IQs doomed to failure? Does our society place too much importance on bookish knowledge? For a student to succed in school/university what is more important: motivation or just plain intelligence?
Of course people with higher IQ's aren't ALWAYS succesful...you better look at it this way: If you take a whole bunch of people with high IQ and compare them to a whole bunch of people with low IQ scores (on real tests) the GROUP of the ones with the higher IQ scores will probably be more OVERALL succesful...but there'll probably still be some people with lower IQ scores who are more succesful than some of the people with high IQs....and so on....
however, people with (real) IQs over 130..as in gifted people often have many different problems...they are said to have overexcitable nervous system, different ways of studying (they are visual-spatial learners and not auditory-sequential learners) which don't fit well with the school system, learning disabilities (as in ADD or ADD like symptomes, auditory processing problems, handwriting disabilities etc.) ...and thus there are a WHOLE BUNCH of gifted people who are so called underachievers, which by definition means they are diagnosed as gifted after taking several standardized tests and after being observed by a psychologist etc. but still their grades are worse than the grades of the average student in school (whereas sometimes they might exhibit great skills in one or a few subjects, whereas they suck in others).. some even fail high school b/c of all that...the numbers for the estimated percentage of those underachievers range from 15 to 50% of all gifted individuals...and that's no joke..(and let's forget the problems that a lot of gifted kids have due to being liked by their peers as they come across goofy arent good at sports and basically what you'd call 'nerds')
However....IQ ist just one of the things that are necessary to become succesful imho....for example if you choose a career where you can hardly make any money and are the smartest person on the planet another guy who goes into business or engineering and is rather of average intelligence might be more succesful than you moneywise..........
4.
For a student to succed in school/university what is more important: motivation or just plain intelligence?
This remidns me of some article I read, where the discussion had come up, whether Kobe Bryant was as good as he is because he's so talented by nature or because he was brought up as an athlete by his father and has always been so overly dilligent....some people had the opinion it was his talent..others had the opininon that it was pure dedication...
but come on......it's always a combination of both...........and whether intellgience is more important in succeeding in college than motivation is....heck I think that's pretty difficult to say..and it will depend on the major you choose as well......but basically in my experience motivation is more important to succed in college (whereas if you're having a shot at computer science you might not stand a chance no matter how motivated you are, in case you're bad with maths...)
