Customer Reviews

The Complete IQ Test Book: How to Understand and Measure Each Aspect of Your Intelligence

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The Complete IQ Test Book is an interesting, friendly book. It is totally without the intimidating feel which many traditional IQ test books seem to cherish. The author writes in an attractivly chatty, personal style, which vaguely reminds one of motivational seminars.

The book's two greatest selling points do indeed have merit: it contains 4, very thorough tests (each about 100 minutes long), divided into functional areas (visual, verbal, math, logic). Most equivilent books offer only one or two tests, and give you no such breakdown. The downside to this, is the tests each have a very eccentric feel from this non-standard format, and will not give you prep experience for the kind of test you may take, say in a school setting. As an example, question #10 in Test 1/Part 1, is actually five questions; whereas the question #9 is one question. Many, if not most of the questions are not multiple choice, as found in a "real world" test. The sections attempting to test creativity are pure hokum, and should be regarded as "for novelty use only."

The scoring for each test is very sloppy. The author will, one the one hand tell us that a particular section is worth 35 points max, when in fact that section counts up to 38 points. This, of course, compromises the results which motivate one to purchase the book at all. In addition, the "points" scored on these tests are ultimately compared to a grid-less table about 2"x3", ambiguously divided into 10 point increments. The upshot of this, is that you'd be able to determine that your IQ is somewhere between 120 and 130, but you would not be able to arrive at a figure like 126. To the authors credit, he makes no claims for exactitude.

If you have curiousity about your IQ, and don't need great precision, by all means get this entertaining book. If you're thinking of getting this as prep for an IQ test awaiting you in the future, you may also buy this and feel your money was decently spent -- but make sure you use this only as a supplement to other, more standard books.

The "Complete IQ Test Book" is just that: Complete. You can test each part of your intelligence separately, or find your overall IQ score. The test-taking procedures, test answers, and scoring are easy to follow. There is an excellent section detailing how to improve your IQ test score. However, despite these positive aspects, my reading was often disrupted by a number of typos. Overall, the book is fun and helpful.

This is the best IQ testing book I have ever seen, and I have done all of them. It is comprehensive, accurate against standardised tests, and gives one the ability to test all IQ domains independently. It's also fun to do. You can even test your creative thinking!

I recommend this book unreservedly.