Tests like the WAIS and Stanford–Binet have been around for decades, but I’m guessing the items can’t stay exactly the same forever. Do they refresh them every few years, or only when a new edition is released?
I know that norms are updated periodically to account for the Flynn effect, but what about the actual content? Are old questions retired to prevent overexposure, or do they just get adjusted and rebalanced?
It’s all about re-norming. The test items themselves might be conceptually similar, but the entire scoring curve is completely different for each new version to make sure your 100 still means “average for this generation.”
Major IQ tests get completely updated every 10-15 years with new versions (like WAIS-IV to WAIS-V). Between those updates, the questions stay the same, but the scoring gets adjusted for the Flynn effect. Old questions eventually get replaced because they become too well-known or outdated—like asking about rotary phones when nobody uses them anymore. So the test stays fresh and fair for each generation.
Oh, yeah. Between editions, they keep the questions the same because that’s kind of the whole point of standardization. If they were constantly tweaking items, it would mess with the validity and make it harder to compare scores over time.