Rascal77s wrote:
Visha9000 wrote:
cathylynn wrote:
100 is average. above 140 is genius.
So what does my 240 mean?
It means you should try a different online test and try to get your money back for the one you took.
Bingo. 240 is a meaningless number in terms of IQ scores. There aren't enough people in the world for anybody to be that many standard deviations above the average.
With a standard deviation of 15, the highest IQ score in the world (i.e., the best one out of seven billion) should be somewhere around 196. With a standard deviation of 16, used by some IQ tests, the highest score is around 203. And that's if you could somehow test every single person on planet Earth.
People have gotten higher scores, but that's mostly because IQ tests get so imprecise above 145 or so. Consider: When you norm a test, you need to have a lot of people to take it, and people who score extremely high are hard to come by. At 145, that's only one person in five hundred, and ideally you need a couple thousand people to figure out exactly where the averages are. There's only so many people you can scrape together and force to sit down and take your test before your funding runs out.
But does it really matter how high your IQ score is? Your IQ score is a number, that's all. It reflects how you did on a particular set of rather mundane tasks on one random day of your life. I don't hold with the idea that IQ scores reflect some sort of abstract "intelligence", because I don't believe intelligence to be a real thing to begin with. There are many different kinds of skills a person can have, and some people have more talents than others, but the more talents you add to the list, the less related they are to each other, the smaller any central, defining "intelligence" factor becomes. By the time you've listed all the useful skills a person could have, "intelligence" has dwindled into a meaninglessly small part of anybody's performance on a test. Yes, some people discover relativity and others never learn how to count to ten; but if I'm going to talk about giftedness or intellectual disability, I want to be specific about exactly what that person's talents or deficits are. We've had far too much stereotyping coming from the idea that a person is either smart or not, and that his "amount" of this abstract quantity called intelligence defines who he is. Couldn't be less true.