I just spent the past hour completing a 12-page IQ test online. I was just surfing the net and one of the sidebar ads waving at me with stupid colorful insomniac-click-here-for-fun flashes sucked me in. As if I need to further demonstrate on myself why I shouldn’t watch late-night marketing when my boredom is high and common sense is low, I invested all this time completing the test thru a site called “Tickle” and when I finished the test, the site wouldn’t give me my score unless I went thru like 5 advertising pages in which I was forced to give out personal contact information for products I don’t care to be solicited by. In the fine print on one page asking me to select various newsletters from Hewitt-Packard, it said that if I don’t select any, one will randomly be selected for me. And it wouldn’t let me proceed without clicking on stuff and giving them my email address. Another alarming ad was for Vonage, the phone company. Apparently this company has gone from cell phone provider to residential land-line provider. It forced me to put down my phone # to be contacted by a salesperson so they can solicit me to transfer to Vonage with some 1st month free promo. I seriously considered just closing the window, but I invested over an hour of my sleepless night really answering the IQ questions to the best of my ability, and I wanted to see the result! So I gave the cliche fake number 555-5555, and it let me get thru the screen. I’m mad about this trickery, by the way. Make you waste all this time and they hold your results hostage until you pay the ransom with your personal information.

I don’t know much about IQ tests, except that I learned in a college class that it’s the 2nd most unreliable test, the most unreliable being a personality test. Looking at the content of the IQ test, I can see why now. It’s a lot of recognizing and perpetuating patterns (which appeals to my OCD side) both with visual figures and with numbers. To perpetuate a numerical pattern, some basic math is required. Knowledge of square roots, for example. To solve some other problem, I even employed the Pythagorean Theorem. You can’t tell me that if I did not have the education I did, that if I grew up in some heavily rural area (they only had one question that even mentioned goats) and therefore would not have known how to figure out how far apart 2 cars are if they leave from the same point going in opposite directions for 6 miles, then turned left and went for 8 miles (the answer I arrived upon was 20 miles apart), that I would be less intelligent than I am now. I’d still have the same brain. Just different frames of references. That’d be like saying all the great warring American Indian tribal leaders are of low intelligence because they don’t know what number should follow 64, 16, 4, 1, 1/4 (I chose the answer to be 1/16).

Anyway, the anti-climactic result they spit at me is as follows, without much explanation:

Congratulations, Cindy!
Your IQ score is 136

This number is based on a scientific formula that compares how many questions you answered correctly on the Classic IQ Test relative to others.

Your Intellectual Type is Facts Curator. This means you are highly intelligent and have picked up an impressive and unique collection of facts and figures over the years. You’ve got a remarkable vocabulary and exceptional math skills — which puts you in the same class as brainiacs like Bill Gates. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your test results.

Find out more in your personalized 15-page IQ Report. It’s ready right now!

Sample Report
In your IQ Report:

A summary of your intellectual strengths from certified staff PhDs
How your IQ compares to others
Average Tickle IQ scores by state
Charts and graphs of your results on 5 intelligence scales
Simple exercises to improve your IQ
The complete answer key to all the test questions

Oh yeah. The test had fill-in-the-blank quotes, too, which required knowledge of some lesser-used words and multi-layered nuances in order to deduce the meaning of the phrase and to fill in with the appropriate word. Anyway, despite knowing that IQ tests are unreliable, I’m still looking for validation in the result: what the hell does 136 mean? How do I rank in the spectrum of IQs of the general populace? I feel swindled that I had to give out my fake phone number for an unsatisfying result. But if they think I’m gonna subscribe to their site and PURCHASE a 15-page IQ report, they must think my IQ is lower than theirs! Which it very well might be, I don’t know because they don’t bother to explain it. Unless I buy the result analysis.