O What are the characteristics of a good intelligence test?

Answer 1

There are the typical testing characteristics of being properly standardized, using a proper sample to normalize it, and be consistent and verifiable. Beyond that, you have to realize there is no single "intelligence" - there are multiple cognitive abilities: logical reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial awareness, etc. So an IQ test may measure all of these, but to do so properly, it must remove influence of prior knowledge (beyond an understanding of the language and numbers being used). This means not asking about where a city is or needing to know about different animals, nor should it involve trick questions which bias much more heavily from having seen such questions before (ultimately there will always be some benefit from having seen similar question before, but this should be minimized). All the information you need should be in front of you, and you only need to be able to process the information to answer the question, because that's what cognitive skills are. Testing information you know is measuring "achievement". Pretty much every IQ test you find online will fail at this because they are not real IQ tests. They are just something made to generate traffic, and usually hand out lots of absurdly high scores.