(A) They are culturally biased

Number sequences and visual patterns are culturally biased?

Memory tests and word puzzles are culturally biased?

We're assuming the person doing the tests can speak English.

(B) Cannot be done by illiterate people, yet some people are illiterate because they've never come into contact with text or they've never been taught so they are illiterate due to environmental factors and not intelligence.

IQ tests are valid for literate people at least, so in some ways, IQ tests are valid.

And illiterate people are usually not intelligent anyway.

(C) Does not take into account the motivation of the participant (one may be highly intelligent and put no effort into the test so they would get lots of Questions wrong).

That's down to how motivated the person is.

That's the fault of the person in that case, it's not the IQ tests fault.

(D) Does not take into physical or mental handicaps that would cause the participant to move slower through the test and therefore not able to complete the test at their full capability (IE: dyxlecis may be very intelligent but take a while to read some letters because their brain sees them differently, or people who are amputees and have to use the hand they never used to write on the test).

Amputees don't count, since amputees have been known to have confirmed IQ's.

We are assuming the person is able bodied and can read the English language.

And dyslexia is a part of intelligence, as a matter of fact.

So dyslexia could be taken into account.

Mental handicaps are also a part of intelligence, as well.

Gifted people with autism have been known to have tremendously high IQ's, as well as having exceptional performance on matters of precision.

Autism affects somebodies communication skills and ability to rationalise about one's surroundings, so it's not going to affect somebody when on a test all that much.

(E) Many people actually study and practice to get better at the test, and so the test is not able to measure accurately the difference between raw intelligence and hard work

Through hard work, the person gains raw intelligence.

Nobody has what you would define as raw intelligence, everybody's intelligence has developed since they were born, unless we are talking about morons with low IQ's whose IQ's would never develop.

(F) Intelligence is an ambiguously defined and understood term therefore it is hard to quantify such concepts. Therefore the measurements will be set with parameters that potentially could be misleading in terms of what they actually are measuring.

What this statement is merely telling me is that it takes several experts to efficiently devise an IQ test and take all the variables into consideration.

All in all, there is nothing inefficient with an IQ test, as it stands.

Very wise of you to point out. My hat tips for you sir ;)

Stephen Hawking in responded to the question of what was his IQ in this way:

"I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."

Amen.

I've read plenty of criticism on IQ tests in the past, some of which really make little sense to me. I don't very well understand how there can be cultural bias when, depending on the test, no cultural information is required. Maybe an environmental bias - somebody living in a jungle might have better spatial understanding than somebody who has spent their life staring at a monitor (at least, that's my excuse for always doing poorly on spatial tests) - but "culture" seems to me to be misused in this sense. I have little emotional intelligence, ranking close to psychopathic on the university-given tests I've taken in the past. However, my linguistic abilities were indisputable when I taught myself Latin at 13 and, at 15, wrote essays that "look[ed] like they were written by my cousin, a philosophy professor," as one of my teachers used to say. For such reasons, I have always found the multiple intelligences theory to be more valid.

How high is your IQ?