I remember when I took the WAIS-IV. While, I did not have access to how the test was scored, I am not certain that a few sections of the test could not be open to interpretation.
#Story below, feel free to skip:#
One section involved comparing and contrasting two words. I remember one of the questions being "practical vs. pragmatic." For the differences, I really wanted to say, "There is no such thing as a pragmatic joke!" However, I do not know if that would have been accepted or not.
On the symbol matching part of the test, I kind of got into it with the psychologist. In that section, there was a key at the top of the page that presented multiple different symbols all with an associated a number. There was somewhere between 25 and 50 of these symbol questions on the page in random order. For example, question one would be a square, and I would write '3', question 2 would be circle, and I would write '5', and so on.
Upon seeing this section of the test, I figured out, "Why not just fill in all the squares with '3', then do all the circle problems, then the triangle problems, etc.?" Well, I started to do just that, and the psychologist freaked out. "No! The test was not designed to be solved that way. You have to solve all the questions in sequential order." Of course, being the impulsive ADHD person I am, I said, "What do you mean? It's my test. I don't give a fuck how it was designed." After a bit more back-and-forth arguing, it was at that point the psychologist then told me, "Time is ticking!" Well, I started to freak out a bit, because I had no idea the test was timed. The psychologist never even told me prior to that moment. So, I became even more unmotivated after that interaction, and occasionally would give the wrong answer to some questions that were ridiculously easy just to see what would happen -- would the psychologist even notice or care? No, he didn't. But I did realize one thing: IQ is not solely a measurement of intelligence, because clearly I could fuck with it a bit, and the test couldn't measure me lack of earnest motivation. Though, in the end it doesn't really even matter because that test informed me of nothing I (nor anyone else that knew me) already didn't know. Wow, I don't have a severe mental disability nor am I the next Von Neumann. Glad to see over a hundred years of psychometric research has truly amounted to a lot...
