Question
What is a good IQ score?
Short answer
Any IQ above 100 is above average, since 100 is the mean by design. Many people treat 110 and up as a good score: 110 starts the WAIS-IV High Average band and is higher than about 75% of people. 120 and up is labeled Superior, and 130 and up Very Superior.
Want your own number? The test is 25 visual puzzles, about 12 minutes, no sign-up.
Good compared with what?
An IQ score is a position, not a grade. It tells you how you did compared with people your own age on the test's reference sample (Wikipedia: Intelligence quotient). So “good” really means “higher than most”. The table shows where common scores sit, computed from the normal curve with mean 100 and standard deviation 15.
| IQ | Higher than about | WAIS-IV label |
|---|---|---|
| IQ 100 | 50% | Average |
| IQ 110 | 74.8% | High Average |
| IQ 115 | 84.1% | High Average |
| IQ 120 | 90.9% | Superior |
| IQ 125 | 95.2% | Superior |
| IQ 130 | 97.7% | Very Superior |
| IQ 140 | 99.62% | Very Superior |
The labels come from the WAIS-IV classification (Wikipedia: IQ classification). They are shorthand for ranges, and a score near a boundary could easily fall on either side on another day. Clinical manuals report a confidence interval, often around plus or minus 5 points at 95% (Wechsler, 2008).
Try one · Quantitative Reasoning
Which number comes next?
26, 37, 50, 65, 82, 101, ?
Tap the option you think is right, or show the answer.
Show the answer
The next number is 122 (option 4).
How to solve it
- The gaps (11, 13, 15, 17, 19) grow by 2 each time, which is the pattern of square numbers.
- Each number is a square number plus 1: 5 × 5 + 1, 6 × 6 + 1, 7 × 7 + 1, 8 × 8 + 1, 9 × 9 + 1, 10 × 10 + 1.
- So the next number is 11 × 11 + 1 = 122.
That was 1 puzzle. The full test has 25.
Does a good IQ mean a good outcome?
Across large groups, higher scores go with more education and higher job level, and weakly with income: a 2007 meta-analysis reported correlations of about 0.56, 0.45 and 0.23 (Strenze, 2007). Those are tendencies across thousands of people. They do not decide anything for one person, and plenty of people with average scores do very well.
Reading your own number
If you have a score, read it as a range and look at the percentile, which is easier to interpret than the IQ number itself. The guide to reading an IQ score walks through every part of a result, and the percentile calculator converts any score.
Sources
- IQ classification. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification
- Intelligence quotient. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
- Strenze, T. (2007). Intelligence, 35(5), 401-426. doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2006.09.004
- Wechsler, D. (2008). WAIS-IV Technical and Interpretive Manual. Pearson.