IQ testing: another excuse to buy iPads

You can learn more about administering IQ’s on iPads at Pearson’s Q-Interactive. Incidentally, you can also learn about Q-global there which is a website psychologists and other professionals use to administer a number of psychological tests online such as the MMPI-2. There is also a nice review from 2 years ago on this neuropsychology blog.

Some psychological tests can get a bit pricey- especially IQ tests. If you’ve ever thought about purchasing intelligence testing kits you may have received sticker shock at some of the prices. The prices for the Wechsler scales are over $1,000 each. So if you were like me (I’m a psychologist with a solo private practice) you’d start calculating how many IQ administrations you’d have to give in order to make that money back and whether you’d for sure get those referrals (and whether it was worth your time to do those administrations rather than something else you can make money on right away and don’t have to invest $1,000’s in startup capital on).

However, I used to do a lot of cognitive testing and enjoyed doing it (and I’ve missed it a bit). So, the good news is over the last few years the economics of purchasing IQ testing is starting to change a bit. Sure, the Wechsler IQ testing kits are still really expensive– particularly when you compare the cost of buying three different Wechsler scales (WPPSI-IV, WISC-V, WAIS-IV) to one Stanford-Binet 5 (which covers a similar age range to those three Wechsler tests but costs the same as perhaps buying one). However, Pearson now offers a different option. You can choose to administer the testing on two iPads (one for the examiner and one for the examinee) instead of purchasing testing kits.

Your startup capital requirements would include buying two iPads of course. However, somehow buying yourself two iPads seems more fun than purchasing IQ testing kits. You’d also need to pay for an annual software license. For a solo practitioner and only 3 tests (ex: WISC-V, WAIS-IV, WMS-IV) you’d be looking at $200 per year (the price goes up the more people and tests you add). You’d also pay a relatively small fee for each test administration (around $1.50 per subtest). So now for less than the cost of one Wechsler IQ test kit you can come up with a reason to convince your spouse that you need to have two iPads (and be able to administer multiple cognitive measures).   When you purchase a software license things like the blocks for the Block Design subtest are provided to you in a starter kit. Some subtests on the test which currently still require some paper, including items on the processing speed index, will also be “going digital” later in 2016 and will be directly on the iPad and not on paper (according to James Henke of Pearson). Some tips: at this point the research was done with a standard size iPad and not some of the newer sizes such as the iPad mini. For this reason the examiner can use a standard size or the iPad mini but the examinee shouldn’t use the mini or another size other than the standard size. The iPads also have to be generation 2 or newer.  The examinee can also use an iPad air. I asked James Henke of Pearson for a good recommendation for the type of iPad for an examinee and he suggested an iPad air first or second generation “would set you up nicely.”