Being an Architect is difficult and there is plenty of evidence that this is not a vocation that is suitable for everyone. The coursework you will take in college is all over the place – from the drawing and design classes to physics and upper level math requirements, you seem to have to be both an artist and a scientist to go down this path. This begs the question, Just how smart do you need to be in order to become an architect? Welcome to Episode 171: The IQ of an Architect
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Today Andrew and I are going to be talking about intelligence quotient and architects. This was a topic that I tackled with the 3rd blog post I ever wrote (titled IQ's and Jobs), and for years, it was a foundational blog post in the development of my website because so many people read that article. I just checked and it currently has 92 comments, and almost amusingly, there are some angry people out there and they are vocalizing their discontent.
When I was younger, probably between the ages of 8 and 12, I bet I took 20 of them. My mother was a school teacher and all of her schoolteacher friends Would use me and my sisters as practice subjects as they were pursuing diagnostician licenses. I am going to confess right now that this is a nerdy episode because there is a lot of data that needs to be presented and digested in order for us to have a fruitful conversation.
The History jump to 8:21
The origins of the IQ test can be traced back to early-20th-century France. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education commissioned psychologist Alfred Binet and his colleague Théodore Simon to develop a method to identify children who required special educational assistance. The result was the first practical intelligence test, known as the Binet-Simon Scale (published in 1905). The French government needed a systematic way to distinguish students whose learning challenges were not being met in the regular classroom. The aim was to provide extra support, not to label them pejoratively or permanently, but to help tailor education to their needs.
Binet and Simon introduced the concept of a “mental age.” The test included a series of tasks grouped by age level (e.g., tasks that an average 7-year-old could handle, an average 8-year-old could handle, etc.). A child’s performance on age-relevant tasks indicated their “mental age”—a reflection of cognitive performance relative to age-based norms.
Memory: Recalling digits or sentences
Problem-Solving: Completing puzzles or analogies
Verbal Skills: Defining words, understanding analogies
Attention & Comprehension: Following instructions, basic reasoning
The tasks grew progressively more complex. If a child could perform the tasks that most 8-year-olds could but not those of a typical 9-year-old, the test would assign that child a “mental age” of 8.
Although Binet did not explicitly define IQ as a single number, the later concept of IQ was directly inspired by the idea of mental age. Psychologist William Stern (1912) introduced the term Intelligenzquotient (Intelligence Quotient) as a ratio.
Not long after Binet and Simon released their scale, Lewis Terman at Stanford University adapted and expanded their test. The resulting Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales (first published in 1916) formalized the IQ concept for the English-speaking world and continued to refine “mental age” benchmarks. Terman’s goal was to make Binet’s test more suitable for the American population by adjusting questions, norms, and scoring based on data from U.S. schoolchildren. He also introduced the now-familiar numeric scale with an average (mean) of 100 and a set standard deviation—initially, each standard deviation was 15–16 IQ points.
Terman’s (Circa 1916) Stanford-Binet Categories
Although the exact cutoff points and names varied slightly in different editions,