• Question: what was your IQ in school ?

    Asked by veaseyshaw to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by 10samlarc4.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Being a scientist isn’t about how good you are at an IQ test but how many questions you ask and how keen you are to find the answers. In school I paid attention because I wanted to know stuff. I may be good at science but I do have the common sense of a gnat. I lost my keys for three months and then found them in the freezer. I don’t know either!

    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Since you ask, when I was 14 I sat an IQ test meant for 16-year-olds and got 135. But really IQ isn’t very important. Having a really passion for what you do, and a curiosity to find out new things, those are far far more important than how well you can do on a test. For example: when I applied for my PhD, the people I applied to weren’t really very interested in what I got in my exams or how well I’d done at any tests. They were more interested in what research I had done and how I had done it.

    • Photo: Sam Vinko

      Sam Vinko answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Somewhere in the top 1%, but that really doesn’t matter much – maybe for a scholarship but beyond that nobody cares. How quickly you can toy with shapes, do subtractions or memorize long numbers means precious little at the end of the day: dedication and work is often far more important.

    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      I don’t know what my IQ was, or is. I’m not sure that it’s a very useful thing to measure. It’s better to see how good people are at dealing with actual problems in the real world.
      I did get good marks when I was at school though.

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