What is the purpose of the IQ test?  You may need to take more than 5 mins if you want a valid measure.

Since verbal IQ is the predominant cause of educational achievement, it does not make sense to treat education as a confounder.

Anthony,

Thank you for your reply.

What I need is a measure of pure innate IQ, which functions the same with all people, regardless of their ethnic background or education. The reason for this is that I want to test hypotheses based on evolutionary psychology.

Measures that test verbal ability and ask you to solve math problems might be adequate enough for most purposes, but, to my understanding, they are reflective not only of a person's IQ, but of her social background (some people have more access to education, some people have less). This introduces a bias (even if a small one) which I want to avoid if it is possible.

   You need to check out the extensive work of Richard Lynn on group differences in IQ based on a century of research into the structure of intelligence.  This work is not well known since no one wishes to confront the results.  Either the IQ tests have been unfairly dismissed, or the investigators have been demonised.

   If we assume that mankind is characterised by a considerable increase in IQ over the ages; that this has occurred by natural selection; that this has been driven by variations in the environment;  then it follows that different parts of the world will be at different stages of this development, that IQ will now vary for genetic reasons in different places.  These differences may not be large or important, but you have to be very brave to research in this area.

   All technical factors for IQ testing have been comprehensively reviewed by Jensen (eg The g Factor).

Social background is not an independent variable.   It represents the accumulated assets, wealth and power from the compounded abilities of all previous generations of that family, and hence is at least in part a genetic variable.  Humans are not passive like plants, at the mercy of the terrain and the weather, they can and do actively search out and mould their environments, creating their own niches.

The Swallow's Tail by Dali ...I love the composition.  The speaker and listener has to be measured together?  by selection/election/rejection? 

Anthony,

Thank you for your suggestions. I intend on carrying out the study with adolescents, and environmental influence on their relative verbal and mathematical ability is far more expressed than in adults, e.g. a kid who has quite average IQ, but does some extra-curricular work with a language teacher might score better on verbal IQ tests than a kid who has the same genes, but lacks the opportunity to get additional knowledge and practice. Basically, I want to control for the Matthew effect, which can skew my data in a way that makes testing evolutionary hypotheses impossible.

"Basically, I want to control for the Matthew effect"

But isn't it precisely the Matthew effect that has driven the evolution of intellectual ability?  There have surely been powerful positive feedback loops, with active selection not passive reception of environments.

" I intend on carrying out the study with adolescents, and environmental influence on their relative verbal and mathematical ability is far more expressed than in adults"

   Personally, I find studies in this area that use brief or short form IQ tests uninterpretable, also ones that do not clearly separate g, verbal and non-verbal IQ. 

    Behaviour genetic studies show that common or familial environment is a major component of individual differences in IQ in infancy, less so in adolescents, and washes out completely in adults.   So, I don't think imposed general environments in adolescents are going to explain IQ differences in adults.

Any evolutionary theory that purports to explain longitudinal group changes in IQ over time also has to address cross-sectional group IQ differences, or at least explain why they can be ignored:

"In 1995, Skeptic magazine published one of our most controversial issues in our 25 year history, one dedicated to analyzing the claims of a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein titled The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.  It merits revisiting because of recent events in which Charles Murray has been booed off stage at two academic institutions in March and April of 2017: one at Middlebury College and the other at Villanova University.  One of the startling facts to emerge from these recent protests is that both students and professors who were protesting admitted that they had never read any of Murray’s books but that the very idea that there could be group differences in intelligence was anathema and not open for discussion.  They didn’t even want to hear Murray’s arguments, much less try to refute them."                     skeptic.com Apr 19 2017.

Sometimes even a single case study challenges conventional thinking on the dominant importance of environment:

(From Obit of Kozo Yamamura, THE Apr 20th 2017 p22):

  His mother died giving birth, his father was executed as a British spy.  "He grew up in an orphanage in Tokyo but ran away at the age of 12 and was rescued from near-starvation by a young black marketeer in Kobe.  Although he had no earlier formal education, he was accepted at the prestigious Ashiya High School, came top of his class (1953) and passed the entrance exam to attend the University of Tokyo."

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Had AHS asked me to asses his suitability for special entry, I would have been quite happy giving him a standard verbal IQ test, since this would be a strong predictor of his academic future.  

Although it is certainly interesting to learn about cases where people succeed against overwhelming odds, the environment remains one of the most influential forces that shape an individual. The impact of environmental variables has been extensively discussed by Flynn in his book "What is intelligence?" and from reading it I am not so quick in dismissing the importance of environment, especially given the fact that I don't want to predict academic achievement with the IQ test (because for that purpose a regular verbal IQ scale would certainly work wonderfully). I want to test something completely different. Verbal IQ measures remain as my fallback option if I don't manage to find anything better suited for my purposes, but still, I'd like some alternatives for measuring unconfounded general intelligence, if there are any.

 "The impact of environmental variables has been extensively discussed by Flynn"

  The main plank of this argument is the Flynn Effect, the secular rise in IQ over the last century in developed countries.   I agree that everyone thinks this must be an environmental effect, but precisely which factor is inexplicably obscure.  Equivalent rises have occurred in infant tests, excluding at once many otherwise plausible explanations.  Personally, I think the FE is a genetic, or at least genomic, effect, due to selective changes in infant mortality and morbidity.  

 "I'd like some alternatives for measuring unconfounded general intelligence"

There is a vast amount of existing data on this -- see Deary, prospective epidemiological cohorts (eg Dunedin study),  Jensen's comprehensive reviews, etc.   However, with the rapid advances in genome reading, it won't be long, or is already the case, that we will find which IQ measure has the highest correlation with the relevant IQ genes, which will be the one to use.   But I don't think it will be a short test.