Can someone actually explain how IQ tests work? By work, I mean how are the tests engineered, and the results computed.
Long time ago someone explained to me that the engineering of IQ tests was actually drafted from a very large pool of (regularly updated) questions, where statistical significance was extracted to form a _core symposium_ of questions to sample from. Also, the IQ score itself was normalized to be normally distributed centered at 100.
With this understanding, I was under the impression that IQ was a relative measure, at a specific point in time, of one's placement in the distribution.
Which meant to me that IQ cannot "drop" across a population, the mean will always be 100. And IQ scores cannot be compared on a time series basis, since they are only cross sectional measures.
Is that all wrong? Is there some truth to it?
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