But it’s clear from my daughter’s experience that they are regrading, but still with a high fail rate.

“4 Year Old With IQ 160″ sounds much more exciting if you interpret it to mean “4 Year Old Could Outscore Adult With IQ 159 On Same Tests”.

Also if you think about it, given that IQ scores are age normed, if anything the scores mean less, the younger you go.

If you’re 4 years old and you have ‘the mental age of a 4 1/2 year old’ that would give you a very high IQ score because 6 months of development makes a lot of difference, at that age.

But really it just means you’re a fast developer. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will end up that much smarter as an adult.

Yes, you are exactly right, about all of that.

Except that at my old university, in science, engineering and medicine, they are still using the old system. When my daughter went back to start her second year, more than 50% of the first year enrolment had disappeared. Failed. Gone. That was life science. By the time she started her third year, there were only two or three male students left – all of the rest had failed, including the ones who kept saying that girls can’t do science. She was very amused

#44 Sandgroper,
I have heard that in olden days (in 50s or 60s) professors would deliberately fail about 50% of class so that the ones who get through are really all that. Now it is all grading on curve, so getting through doesn’t tell anything except for the basic capability (until the professional practice weeds out those who can’t take the heat).

Terzaghi and Timoshenko were so highly revered that I inherited the first edition copies of their books on soil and structural mechanics intact.
Emeritus Professor on my committee used to say that some topics need a co-evolution of other parts of theory/technology to be fully appreciated. His favorite example is how the pocket calculators revolutionized civil engineering practice and researchers were more “free” to develop equations that contained cube roots or such.

Working with plasticity, nonlinearity on a daily basis needed personal computers I guess.

“Professors never die, they only lose their Faculties.” Sadly, he did.

I’ve known one or two people who were up there and were big contributors; I’d categorise the late Peter Wroth as brilliant (and also a nice man) – engineering mathematician at Oxford. I’d guess he was around 150 or so, there was no subject he could not engage you on knowledgeably – if you wanted to talk about soccer, he would.

well, they better seem smarter than me! my friend was definitely not smarter than me.

I used to think it would be blindingly obvious when someone is brilliant (like 1 in 1000), but I am not sure anymore.

i wouldn’t say 1 in 1000 is really brilliant. i mean, you can defend that term for them. but brilliant is as brilliant does…. and most people don’t do jack.

When I enrolled in engineering, the advice from the university was you needed 135 to get through. They didn’t get a mean of 135 in the intake, of course. 50% of my intake failed first year and got kicked out – some due to that, some just due to excessive beer consumption, I think. About 15% of my intake made it through the 4 years without at least having to repeat a year – 10% civils and the others split 50-50 electrical and mechanical. Of those, I’d estimate about half or so are still working in engineering. The first year intake was 196 students, which generated about 15 – 20 people still working in engineering or related management 40 years later, including the first girl to ever graduate from that university in engineering, a blue eyed blondie – a Vietnamese girl would have done it the year before, but she died of stomach cancer during her final year. Blondie’s still going strong. The intake at that university (Western Australia) is now 12% female; the intake at the Hong Kong universities that teach engineering is 50% female (no affirmative action for girls – in fact it was only after a public scandal/outcry/condemnation about 10 years ago that they stopped down-grading the results of female school-leavers on the grounds that ‘boys mature later’ so female school leavers have an ‘unfair’ advantage.) In that age group, Hong Kong has slightly more females than males, but the engineering working environment is still given as the deterrent for a small %.

It’s easier now, but a first degree + minimum 5-6 years structured professional training is no longer enough.

In your opinion, what would be the criteria for being noticeably smarter?

Some people could be really smart at getting into the depth of something complex and some can be very quick at catching new idea/theory. Some are better at articulating their understanding and with others you would have to look at their work to know. How do you judge?

I used to think it would be blindingly obvious when someone is brilliant (like 1 in 1000), but I am not sure anymore.

How could you be so sure that his SATs/your judgement of him indicated a 140 IQ vs 150? I could see how a 2000 SAT would invalidate a 150 IQ claim, but a 2250 SAT wouldn’t necessarily.

because 150 people are often noticeably smarter than 140 people. 150 IQ is 1 out of 1,000. 140 is 1 out of 150. 140 is commonish in my social circle. 150 is not as common.

A point that a lot of people don’t seem to get is that there is a difference between someone who graduates with a first degree in engineering, and a professionally qualified practising engineer. If you don’t get the point that one of the things that distinguishes the professional engineer from the sub-professional is the novel element, then you don’t.

Another point is that practising engineers actually do more than just sit around all day doing calculations or navel gazing. Given that you have clean water to drink, roads to drive on and a sewerage system to shit into, I would have thought that might be obvious to you, even if you don’t actually get the more dramatic bits because you really don’t have much of a clue about what engineers do.

That explains everything.

that was miko, not me.

Spike Gomes said: ” I tend to have more fun when I’m the stupidest guy in the room . . . ” – Reply: I myself may not be the stupidest person ever to post on the Discover blog threads, but I probably have the least scientific training. (Liberal arts major.) The problem is, I never could stand listening to English majors, but I like hearing what the science people have to say.

But as I said, I’m going by what my wife has told me. Her father was a mechanical engineer who worked for GM, among other places. He’s now semi-retired, and works as an expert witness for car insurance companies on accidents (velocities, angles of impact, etc. She got her undergraduate degree in engineering, and mostly socialized with engineers. Her best friend, longest-term ex-boyfriend, and many other acquaintances either are current or former engineers. And in her new career as an architect, she works with engineers on a regular basis. She feels like she has enough of a background in engineering that she can provide stereotypes for each kind (mechanical, electrical, chemical, civil, etc).

She has not gone into great detail about what being an engineer actually entailed (besides it being highly-paid, but boring), but from what I gather, at least within her area, it was reading a lot of code and regulations, and applying equations repeatedly. Within her current job, it seems like the architects to the designing, and then the engineer comes back with a response on all the ways the building may fail from a structural or other standpoint.

Edit: I think she’s said, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of engineers:

1. The nerds who like to make things.

2. The people who need a profession, are good at math, so just kinda end up doing it.