Vocabulary Test [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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Huh ... I saw this somewhere this morning, read a bunch of LJ entries, tried this, and have already forgotten where I found it in the first place: Peter Schmies's Word Classification Test is a lot harder than I expected.

The fact that I'm disappointed and a little embarrassed not to have scored higher than I did probably says a lot more about me than my actual score does. (It's not that my score doesn't say I'm "smart enough" -- I can't complain about my percentile ranking according to the blurb at the top of the test. It's more that I'm not supposed to find that many words I don't know in one place. I'm dissatisfied with my raw score (171 out of 200).)

Then again, I remember that I wasn't really happy with my SAT scores either, because they weren't quite as good as my PSAT, and was tempted to take it again. I guess I'm still me.

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There are 34 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

That's a damned good score. I'm seeing a lot of people getting 140's and 150's.

Hard test.

M

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I got 161, and I did have to guess quite a few.
Tolerable for a non-native, I'd say.

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153.

I really need to read up my latin.

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Argh. Latin.

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I should have thought a medicinare has an extensive command of latin...

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Oh, yes. Whatever relates to body parts.

I did take a short Latin course back in "high school," focusing entirely on the use of Latin (and Greek) in science, medicine and law. Of course, we did some ethymology, too. Reading this, I realise it was a very long time ago.

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Yeah, but all the Latin I know is, "Ita, nos habemos non ullas bananas."

No, that's not quite true, there's also "Cogito ergo ..." sumthing or other. Oh, right! "Cogito ergo oblivio!"

(Okay, I do know a little more than that, but I would've done better on that if the Greek to Latin ratio had been higher.)

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Then, there's always "Semper ubi sub ubi,"[1] and I think you were present at that discussion somewhere.

browngirl's journal?

[1] Which I didn't know before, because it's not a pun in Swedish.

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And then there's "Draco dormiens nunquam titilliandus."

Sound advice, I say.

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More than slightly, I'd say. I'd compliment you, if you could take it. And my English is native. Having read your writing, can I say I'm not surprised? You impress me. Not an easy thing to do.

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*nod* Logically I know it's a good score ... and that it's a hard test. But there's that gut reaction that says, "I'm supposed to do a lot better than that," that I'm trying to analyze.

It's like there's a hidden list in my brain, of things that I'm Not Allowed To Be Unimpressive At, along with a completely unrealistic idea of what counts as impressive. I should uncover that list. (Or maybe I don't need to, but I'm curious.) A part of it might be the idea that "this should be easy", even when that is an unrealistic expectation.

I remember getting my PSAT results back, in high school. I looked at the scores and thought they were decent, but "it was an easy test, so of course I got high scores." Then I looked at the percentile ranking and thought, "Well of course I got high numbers, it was an easy ... waitaminute, that's not what 'percentile' means ... it means I scored higher than ... nah, that can't be right, it was an easy test. That's why my numbers are so high, because it ... waitaminute, wasn't I here a moment ago?" I went around in circles like that for five or ten minutes staring at that piece of paper, trying to reconcile "I can't be that much better than everyone else", "of course I did well, I always do well except in foreign languages and history", "this is a good score", and "I should have done much better than this because it was an easy test". Those thoughts didn't particularly want to fit neatly together, hence the brainlock.

I think part of what bugged me on this one was the simple fact that it's a vocabulary test -- D'Glenn is supposed to Know Words. There's that ... I forget what school, but they've got their annual test of general knowledge that I know next to nothing on, and I start that one being annoyed at myself for not knowing things, and eventually there's some threshold where I start thinking, "How am I supposed to know that?" and suddenly I'm not as disappointed in myself. It's hard to get to that level of acknowledging the test is hard when it's English words and I'm kicking myself for not recognizing at least the roots of the unfamiliar words. I can make that leap when I realize that all the clues of a crossword puzzle are actors on soap operas ("How am I supposed to know that?") but it's harder when it's mathematics or English.

Much analysis still to go before I feel I've really got this corner of my brain sussed out.

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Somewhat similar:

I didn't do any work in high school. I think I also had something going against my father as when I would do work I might or might not turn it in, and for a while there I got one D a term. One term it was Art.

Obviously my father's insistance that I apply mostly to Ivy League schools was close to insane; I got into Rutgers College of Douglas and Wittenberg, and was waitlisted and eventually got into Franklin & Marshall.

Despite USNews ranking Witt as Best Liberal Arts in the Midwest (admittedly not ranked in the Nationals) I took the logic that if they accepted me they must suck.

My ability to continue to do no work (although I did at least complete assignments) my first year and get all A's only enforced this. I'd write a draft, run spell check, turn it in, and get an A-. I'd fall asleep every day in Calculus, call Sam M in a panic before the tests, get him to teach me what I should have learned.... and get an A-. The fact that there were people in the classes who were failing or getting Cs didn't matter.

So I applied to and got into Wellesley, and after much tsurous eventually did transfer. And you know what? Wittenberg would probably have been a better education for me than Wellesley, based on class and teaching style and what courses were available. Even though Wellesley had the better name and rep. For one thing I could never have gotten away with not doing a thesis.

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*nod* Yeah, I remember not working very hard except in the classes I did poorly in, which seemed unfair. I got As in math and Bs in science (because math didn't require I keep a lab notebook) from the moment I started getting letter grades, except for one quarter when I got a B in math and an A in science. (My school (http://www.keyschool.net/home.asp) didn't really believe in grades, since it was originally founded by a bunch of Johnnies (http://www.sjca.edu/asp/home.aspx), but they recognized that anyone applying to a college other than St. John's would need to be able to put a GPA on their applications, so they grudgingly added letter grades to the quarterly comments for grades 9-12 (the school covers pre-kindergarten through 12th grade). They might issue letter grades earlier now, I haven't checked in a while.) My grades in other subjects varied a lot, except that I always had trouble in history (and me a reenactor now -- go figure) and later on I had difficulty with French. I was constantly in danger of losing my financial aid (yes, I was on financial aid in high school ... actually even in Montessori school, though that was a less formal arrangement), until I suddenly realized my GPA would matter and brought my average up in my senior year. I'm pretty sure my poor grades for the previous three years were the reason I didn't make National Merit Finalist. (I had the highest PSAT scores in my class. The other three semifinalists (the entire class was only eleven students, BTW) went on to become finalists.)

The thing is, a lot of the reason I did as well as I did in the classes I was good at, despite doing relatively little work, was that my classmates would ask me for help. Re-teaching what I had just learned did more for me than the homework would have, and when people asked me for help before or during homeroom, my own homework got done as a side effect of helping with theirs.

So when I started at the University of Dallas (http://www.udallas.edu/), where I didn't already have a reputation as a go-to guy for homework help, very little of my homework got done. I'd never gotten in the habit of doing it without the reminder of someone else asking me for help. And I got into some even worse habits, that drove one of my math professors nuts once he figured out what I was doing.

The funny thing is that because I was surrounded in high school by geniuses who were also better students than I was, I thought of myself as below-average. (You'd think having people ask me for help would have been a clue, but noooo.) A common problem for freshmen at UD was that they'd go from being near the top of their high school class, the Smart Kid, the one who didn't need to work, to being merely ordinary compared to the rest of the UD students, and in an environment meant to make someone of their talents have to work. I didn't get hit with the self-esteem blow, but I did get hit with with the cost of poor study habits.

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It drove me nuts. There were a lot of places where I knew both words well and couldn't say they were either same or opposite. I hate this either/or @#$%^&*###! But I turned in a 166 anyway, and thought how much more Latin and Greek I could have used. And yeah, I'm going to bed with my dictionary, too.

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I got 171 also with about 30-50 as being vague intuitions or out and out guesses

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The number of times I had to guess bothered me as well.

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161, which annoyed me a lot until I read the percentile bits.
Well, it still annoyed me, since I ended up guessing a lot.

Then again, I have no Latin at all.

Then I watched

badmagic go through it and made him explain all the words I didn't know.

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Getting the explanations was probably fun. I'm going to be spending a fair amount of time with my dictionary once I finish the stuff I'm in the middle of. Some of the words I didn't know looked like they're probably interesting.

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I got 164. Some of those I was sure I knew the meaning of both words in the pair, but couldn't see a connection between the two!

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I had some like that too. Sometimes changing what part of speech I read one of the words as helped. Other times I just wasn't sure what they were thinking.

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I got a 172. Please don't throw things at me.

I have a friend who has a Ph.D. who got 161. And they had the benefit of a British schooling, instead of American public schools.

Then again, I'm a word nut.

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Considering how much of a logophile you are, I'm surprised our scores aren't further apart. Then again, perhaps several of us are up in the range where statistical noise (which way we happened to guess today on the guesses, which uncommon words of a set we each know a similar percentage of got picked for the test) is greater than meaningful difference in score?

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I got 165, with a lot of wild guesses. There were a few where I didn't know either word, and a lot where I knew only one of the words. I was hoping there would be some sort of separate scoring of the wild guesses -- e.g. you got x% overall, y% of the ones you thought you knew, and z% on your wild guesses. I don't mind getting a low score on my guesses. I really want to find out about things I think I know that I've got wrong.

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You could flip back and look...

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Yah, when I saw the thing about marking which were guesses, I expected them to do the math for me on those, too. I had planned to go through the results and look up each pair I got wrong, but I hit a wrong key and lost my answers. So either I take it again, or I'll just look up each word I'm not absolutely certain of, but I agree that it would be even better to know which ones I thought I knew and didn't.

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There's a lot more tests linked from the bottom of that test: Uncommonly Difficult IQ Tests

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I got 173, which seems to be an uncommonly high score (even on this thread!), but I'm still gonna grumble about it. Many of those words were not English words, in the sense of even "commonly used loanwords" -- they were either pseudolatin scientific coinages, or specific technical loanwords. Not fair!

Why do Latin and Classical Greek get all the cachet for being languages that "intelligent" people learn? Why in hell would intelligent people mess around with dead languages anyway -- why not learn a living language, even if the language is only technically living?! (Yeah, I'm studying Hebrew, but I'm studying modern Hebrew.) It's the same sort of problem as hardly anyone will take you seriously as a "smart person" if you have an arts degree and don't play chess, and I'll go you best two falls out of three on standard IQ test scores any day!

Bias, bias, bias! I'd like to e-mail the developer of that test George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", over and over again until he gets the idea about Latinate words...

Grumble...

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At least they had "thewy." And I think one or two other semi-obsolete Germanic words. And I seem to recall a few things that looked Spanish. To leaven all the Greek and Latin. But that, unfortunately, is where the hard words almost all are in modern English, in the classical-derived vocabulary.

M

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hey, i only scored 167. but then, i also don't have your background in Greek and Latin, which probably has a lot to do with why i didn't do better.

the lowest of the top 100 scores is 172, so i don't think 171 is anything to feel bad about.

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I got a 175. I went back to check my answers. A couple of them I got wrong because I lost track of what "same" and "opposite" mean. D'oh!

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174. I'm definitely going to have to look some of those up.

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I stared at words for one hour and 45 minutes!!!! All because of YOU!! Well, okay you and the fibro.....I had to rethink and recategorized the usage of words to get more than a few. I also accidentally skipped 2. I allowed myself to answer them...seemed kinda fair especially given that I'm staring at TINY words for almost 2 hours!!!

Why, why, why....I couldn't stop myself. I know know how an addict feels (okay, sort of.....probably not.)
My eyes hurt......I wasted a ton of paper-grading time.....
And it occurs to me that on a foggier day, I might score a 42 (that is still the answer to everything though, isn't it?)
'sigh'

Huh? oh, yeah.....it was kind of worth the staring....189 with the 2 missing, 191 with all answered. *blush* Still, I should know better ways to use my time wisely........I thought 'kosher' was a gimme. *snerk*

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I'm dissatisfied with my raw score (171 out of 200).)

How interesting. That's exactly what I got.

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I started taking the test yesterday, but had to leave home before I could get past 40 pairs or so (meeting someone). Must attempt again today at lunch break... Am curious what I'll do; I would be a wordlover (can't remember the greekism, sorry) if I had time for another hobby.

Strikes me that I can say that for many things.

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Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Vocabulary Test

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wow

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Gawd that was hard

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So, MENSA's only 98th percentile

Culture bias much?

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175

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ARRRG!!!

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January