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University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

(planning.e-psychometrics.com)
105 points indigodaddy | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 17:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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aDyslecticCrow ◴[30 Aug 25 19:08 UTC] No.45077182[source]▶
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.

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anonym29 ◴[31 Aug 25 03:29 UTC] No.45080128[source]▶
>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.

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1. tptacek ◴[31 Aug 25 20:40 UTC] No.45086861[source]▶
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.