IQ and EQ: Random Thoughts on Talent, Effort, and Tests

Back when Mizuc was in junior high, all the incoming first-year students would be gathered together to take an intelligence test as a group. I wonder if junior high students still do this today?

At the time I was completely clueless and had no idea this was even happening — in fact, for several years after finishing that test, I still didn’t know what it was. But those who had done “advance” training at cram schools probably knew exactly what it was. That’s what you call winning at the starting line.

After all, I had gone straight from a public elementary school to a public junior high, so there was no real academic pressure. When I first received that test paper from the front row, I didn’t take it seriously at all — I just found it

interesting, so I wrote it slowly and unhurriedly. By the time the final bell rang, there still seemed to be several blank pages left, and I couldn’t even be bothered to rush and fill in the answers at the last minute.

IQ 172

It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned that this was an intelligence test, and that it would be used as a reference for dividing students into gifted and regular classes in junior high.

Judging from the class placement results back then, Mizuc’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test result was probably a bit on the low side.

Also in college, in order to hand in a statistics report for a class, I took two official international intelligence tests.

One was a test from the U.S. government, with a total score of 180; the other was a test from the German (or was it Finnish?) government, with a total score of 150. On the former, I scored 172; on the latter, 145. And this time, because I knew I was taking an intelligence test, I didn’t overthink things like I had in junior high — I simply answered by intuition. In the end, I finished both tests in less than half the allotted time.

It seems that as I grew up, my IQ did grow just a tiny bit more (incidentally, one school of scholars believes that intelligence tests taken in adulthood are not accurate).

Emotional Quotient (EQ)

Speaking of IQ, what’s more popular lately is the emotional intelligence quotient (EQ for short), also known as emotional intelligence — and without EQ, you’re also prone to heartbreak (cold joke).

Ever since the book EQ came out in 1996, people have always had the phrase “a high IQ is not as important as a high EQ” on their lips. It’s roughly the feeling that even if you’re a fool, as long as you can smile at people all day long, you can still survive just fine.

Nearly 20 years have passed since the theory began to spread, and even now, if you go to a bookstore, there are still thousands upon thousands of books discussing human EQ.

From a certain angle, it seems everyone has given up their longing for IQ, believing it to be a gift from heaven (at least not for their grown-up selves). EQ, on the other hand, at least seems like something that can be acquired through family environment or self-study later in life.

Yet ambitious countries like the United States or mainland China still place great importance on cultivating geniuses. By contrast, the Republic of China deliberately set up so-called gifted classes during junior high, only to let them scatter to the winds after graduation. In the United States, there are even so-called genius organizations dedicated to registering geniuses, so those whose names appear on the list are all rigorously verified, highly intelligent geniuses.

These high-IQ geniuses and ordinary people like Xuanming are like two ends of a balance scale.

A while ago I saw a mainland program in which they interviewed one of the so-called geniuses of mainland China. In the middle of the interview, the genius mentioned how they had obtained their high intelligence assessment results — through painstaking, heart-and-soul “constant practice.” In fact, this is worlds apart from what this author imagines a genius to be.

Looking back, the modern genius recognized by the whole world would have to be Einstein. Brother Einstein (as if we’re that close) published many papers of extremely high caliber during the ten years from age twenty-six to thirty-six, including the system of relativity that is widely known and continues to this day. But as a child, Brother Einstein was a problem child disliked by his teachers, and was even considered slow and low in intelligence.

So then, if you’re going to test schoolchildren’s IQ, please also test the teachers’ while you’re at it.

Mizuc’s afterword: For this piece, even I don’t know what I’m talking about. Everyone, please just skip it and don’t read it — just treat it as me practicing typing while drunk.