IQ, You Q, We All Q

I have been volunteering at the psychology department to take a series of personality and intelligence tests to help the 1st year PhD students. It was fun at first, but after today I am convinced that I am some sort of bird brain. My entry into graduate school must have been a sheer admissions processing error.

They had me do the tests with the red and white blocks (straight out of the 1950s!!) where you make the shape indicated in the picture. The first few were a breeze, but I wanted to give up and hurl the blocks across the room like a 2-year-old with colic by the time we got to the "sailboat." My brain just can't work in 3-D. Then they had me detect a series of "patterns"of shapes, and by the end it was so confusing that I gave up and starting picking random pictures. I (seriously) nearly cried when I had to do 7th grade math problems in my head and utterly failed. "I can't write this down?!?!" I said in panic to the tester when she asked me "If David buys 8 pieces of candy for $1.60, how much is it per piece?" When it came time to calculate miles per hour in my head, I fought the blazing lump in my throat and said "I--I don't know, okay???" before she could even finish the question.

When she asked me who wrote Faust, though, I somehow instantly recalled Johann Goethe (though I had to spell out his name rather than pronounce it since I don't speak German). But then I forgot "Europe" in my listing of the seven continents. Figures.