I Once Was A Giver of Cognitive Tests
and now I am laughing out loud
For decades, I was a licensed Psychologist who, as part of my professional career, gave Psychological tests. I gave many kinds of Psychological tests — among which were those that looked at a person’s cognitive abilities.
Many of the tests had manuals that detailed exactly what the person giving the test was “allowed” to say — even answers to what we would now call FAQs from the people taking the tests. The tests were standardized and everyone giving a test was supposed to say the exact same thing to everyone they were testing.
There are many good uses for most Psychological testing and a battery of tests can give a lot of information about a person, information that can be used to help them.
As one giving those tests, I would never say to the client that I was amazed at how well they did. That would have been wrong, not part of the manual, and terribly unprofessional.
Nor would I ever had told a client that they had “aced” the test. One does not “ace” a cognitive test; one gets a score.
I am not familiar with the cognitive test taken by a certain politician [I try to never say his name] so I can only guess that it comes with the standardized commentary allowed by the authorized giver of the test.
Also — there are rules as to who can give certain tests, and only Psychologists are allowed to give some of them and as I said, I am not familiar with the test given and rules have changed since I hung up my proverbial shingle. As this test is not, from what I read, a psychological test, it may not have needed to be administered by a Psychologist. But I assume it had to be administered by some sort of professional who is/was expected to adhere to certain test giving protocols.
So I sit and laugh at the person who took the test. A person who is saying what is being said about this test-taking. And I laugh at the fact that he is so obsessed with telling the world he “aced” it and it was hard. The reaction says more about the person who was given the test than it does about any cognitive ability or the test itself!
Although “some” might be tempted to say the reaction DOES say a lot more about the cognitive ability of the speaker than did the test!
I never laugh at clients, but he is not my client, so I can laugh at the sheer non-professional take he has of a test that is most likely a quick measure of potential cognitive decline and talk about it as if it were some true measure of intellect — maybe like an IQ test.
And by the way, I have a personal take [of course] on the usefulness of IQ tests and what they are measuring — because the definition I learned in graduate school was that “IQ is what the test measures.”
We laughed at that definition then — and I still laugh at it.
And as I am very prone to say “that’s a whole ‘nother topic for another time.”
Edited — August 2020 — here’s a bit of that whole “nother topic :)
