What does your IQ score mean?

Many people do not understand the meaning of an IQ score and hence tend to misunderstand its implications. An IQ score is the supposed measure of your intelligence. I use the word supposed because according to many researchers and psychologist, human intelligence is a fluid concept and thus cannot me measured quantitatively like a linear concept. At best IQ can be defined as the measure of a person’s cognitive skills or more aptly academic intelligence. There are of course two schools of thoughts here as well; people who accept the authenticity and the relevance of IQ scores and others who dismiss the concept of IQ tests and scores.

An IQ scores is a measure of your comparative intelligence. In other words, it aims at comparing your intelligence with the intelligence of others in your age group. It would however, be more appropriate if besides the age the educational qualification is also taken into consideration. Even though most IQ tests tend to use questions that do not use skills picked up at formal educational levels, areas such as verbal reasoning and vocabulary certainly depend on your linguistic prowess.

The test questions are designed to measure your mental age in comparison to your actual age. So it’s essentially the ratio of your intelligence compared to the intelligence of others of the same age group. For example, if a 10 years old child takes a test which is designed for a 15 year old and gets through it, his mental age will be that of a 15 year old even though his actual age is 10.

After years of extensive usage of the test on people of all age groups, ethnicities and nationalities, it has been concluded that half of the people who take the test usually get average scores (90-110). Only a quarter of the population lies above this level and a quarter lies below. Even out of the 25% who are above average only 2% would qualify is gifted or extremely intelligent. The same holds true for people who lie in the below average category, here again only 2% of the people would fall in the ‘ very low intelligence’ category.

If you are wondering how these percentages are determined, it’s quite simple your scores are plotted in a normal bell curve with the scores of others in your age group; now 50% of the people would fall in or around the center of the bell curve. However for the other 50% there will be a deviation from the standard indicating higher or lower than normal IQ.

To make it simpler lets take the example of a person who scored 40% on an IQ test, suppose the test comprised of 10 questions and he just got four correct. So logically one can conclude that this person’s IQ score is 40. But in reality the score is compared to the scores of others. So in case 50% of the people who took the test got the same marks as our test takes his score will be 50% and not 40%. Similarly if 20% of the people who took the test scored 40% on it, our test taker’s score will now be 80% and not 40%.

If one were to categorize the different IQ scores, this is what it would look like

IQ Score	What it means?	Percentage of people who fall in this category.
130 and above	Extremely Intelligent	2.2%
120-130	Very Intelligent	6.7%
110-119	Highly intelligent	16%
90-109	Averagely Intelligent	50%
80-89	Below Average Intelligence	16%
70-79	Low Intelligence	6.7%
Below 70	Extremely Low Intelligence	2.2%

If your score does not lie in the average category, there is no need to fret, after all even Einstein wasn’t considered to be particularly intelligent in school but we all know how he turned out.