Sunday, January 26, 2014

A Sudden Rise: A Second Opinion


   Actually, treating the CAS as being only a System for Cognitive Assessment and not a bona fide IQ test (I'm assuming here there wasn't actually an IQ test that also happened to say 115 and everyone was treating my CAS score as an actual IQ test,) but, treating it like that, my score of 118 in the eighth grade, my second-most recent barrage and the one preceding my highest barrage, was the lowest IQ I've scored. As far as I've found the results for all the IQ tests I've ever taken, that is. Two barrages in the second grade, 122 on the KBIT and 125 on the K-ABC. Maybe this most recent score doesn't represent an exponential growth so much as... Well, something else. I'm not sure what. A fluctuation. A drop in the eleventh grade, I guess.

   Ha, so it turns out that the real mystery is not why it rose so suddenly but why it dropped so suddenly before that. No list needed for this one; it's probably something unsexy like conditions on the day of the test itself. These things are entirely mutable. So there was a rise, and a fall. Capacity for both fluid and crystallized intelligence is said to increase until well within the 20s (thanks, Wikipedia!)

   Maybe my second grade IQ was even higher than it was measured to be, come to think of it, seeing as how that was before my Asperger's diagnosis and autistic people tend to under-perform on IQ tests. The eleventh grade would represent a true drop, of quite a bit for whatever reason (it wasn't lack of stimulation.) There was no adjustment made there for the autism because the autism wasn't diagnosed. Wait, no. The Asperger's wasn't diagnosed; the autism was diagnosed just fine. The barrages I took in second grade were quite thorough, with different scores for different categories, so even then I don't think that much adjustment would be needed.

   Also treating the CAS as being not a true test of Intelligence Quotient means that there's a gap from the second to the eleventh grade in which my IQ was not tested, so there was room for all kinds of fluctuation there. That effectively put my second grade IQs as outliers, which is why I didn't report them in my initial discussion of my historical IQs. Should I have? I don't know; I made a judgement call and I'm sticking with it.


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