I am a relatively young man who got an idea in his head that going to college to study Special Education would help me to help others who have suffered with learning disabilities. But when I took an Iq test called the WAIS III I discovered that my Iq is low average and I barely had the mental capacity to work at the job I currently have. My Iq is in the high 80’s which devastated me when I discovered how low it was.
So should I let that discourage me from seeking post secoundary education or not?
Re: IQ
The mean is set at 100 and the standard deviation 15. So, that puts the big hump in the center of the Bell curve between 85 and 115. That hump includes 68% of the population and that’s average.
More importantly, I learned years ago (okay, it was the early 1970s) not to trust just one score. People have bad days due to health reasons, family problems, bad experiences with tests and lack of sleep among other things.
Why not go ahead and take a class or two and see what you think? Or even audit one and save some money.
One question…Before taking the WAIS, how long had it been since you’d taken a test of any kind?
John…I do career counseling and test people for a living. You’d think I’d have more repect for tests.
i.q.
Sometimes your i.q. has nothing to do with what you may find to be your calling as a vocation. At the end of the day, your i.q. is nothing but a number! There are scads of different theories about i.q.’s; one theory I respect is that of multiple intellegences. The “theory” of mulitple intellegences is basically that there are some things you are super good at and some things that you are not going to be super good at. I think your situation with your i.q. could mean such a thing as that and I also respect the posts of Victoria and John because you do not type like someone with a 80 i.q.
So, maybe you should get retested. I had to get l.d. testing this time last year and my i.q. was soo out of whack that the lady who tested me wrote out my strengths and weaknessess as deemed by all this testing and stuff instead of focusing on my i.q. score as some number.
John is cool. Before you go all out getting your schooling, take a semesters worth of one or two classes to see what you can do. That is a very wonderful idea and no one at any school would mind that. I do not think there would be many folks at most colleges or universities if going part time was not allowed! So, I would really think of what John wrote as well as what Victoria wrote.
The heck with your i.q. meaning that you should not be working at the job you have now or anything like that. Good heavens, it is the year 2004; so you work that job and try your best to figure out your schooling.
My great uncle, who is related to me by marriage, he was born with a borderline i.q. in the 1930’s in a very rural area of Tennessee. There was no such thing, in the boonies, as a chance to go to university part time or even gaining meaningful employment if you were a different learner because of your i.q. This fellow worked in a factory where he was the king of being able to fix machines and stuff. If he was living in the times we are living in now, I really think with all my heart, that he would have become an engineer…because even now he can fix anything and he can do old fashioned wooden logic puzzles really well. This poor fellow went on disability at an early age and were it not for my late grandmother marrying his brother, he would be in a home right now.
So, “I hope a Trial Envolves Me”, you do what you have to do to get your schooling. I would think that you woudl not want to become some person who did not allow themselves to live up to their potential because it is the YEAR 2004! We are in very modern times, man!
IQ scores are not always accurate. You do not write like someone with an IQ in the low 80’s so maybe something else is going on here.
One example: when I was teaching in a very rural area, I met one other teacher who was very against the use of IQ scores. She said that when she was in elementary school, they were given an IQ test and she scored 80 and was assumed to be barely educable. Luckily her parents did not believe this and kept her in school, and she went to college and became a teacher. Looking back, she realized that the test they were given was full of things like pictures of elevators and escalators and cars and all sorts of things she had never seen. She said if they had given a test with pictures of combines and swathers and different brands of tractors, she would have been a genius.
That is one example of how tests can go wrong, being culturally too different from the person being tested.
The test can also be wrong if a person speaks another language as their first language, or if the person has hearing or vision defects, or if the person has uncorrected dyslexia and is given a paper and pencil test, or if the person is ill.
Another example: when I taught driver’s ed, my supervisor was a nice gentleman who had specialized in teaching driver’s ed full-time for many years. He told me that when he was in elementary school he could not read a word. Finally in junior high school, in Grades 7 and 8, he got a good teacher who actually taught him to read. He was able to finish high school and junior college and become a teacher of a useful skill.
You should definitely get re-tested. If possible get an individual test given by an experienced psychologist.
As far as being a teacher, well, some people are good at school and teaching and some are not. Try to find an area where you really do have something to offer and work on that. People are needed to teach academic subjects and also art, technical courses, vocational courses, driver’s ed, sports, and many other things.