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Originally posted by lordikon
IQ's
Mental Retardation: < 100
Below Average: 100
Average: 120
Above Average: 140-160
Genius is usually around 160+, up to I think around 230 for people who are freakin mutants.
Bush is probably average. I wouldn't say Kerry is much smarter though, I don't really know, never met the guy.
IQ's
Mental Retardation: < 100
Below Average: 100
Average: 120
Above Average: 140-160
Genius is usually around 160+, up to I think around 230 for people who are freakin mutants.
Bush is probably average. I wouldn't say Kerry is much smarter though, I don't really know, never met the guy.
Mental Retardation: < 75
Average: 100
Intellectually gifted: >130
Genius: >150
The highest IQ in the world (according to Guiness) is a housewife in the Midwestern US with an IQ of 220.
See the following description of IQ as copied from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
IQ, an abbreviation for "intelligence quotient", is a score derived from a set of standardized tests that were developed with the purpose of measuring a person's cognitive abilities ("intelligence") in relation to one's age group. It is expressed as a number normalized so that the average IQ in an age group is 100 — in other words an individual scoring 115 is above-average when compared to similarly aged people. It is usual, but not invariable, practice to standardise so that the standard deviation (ó) of scores is 15. Tests are designed so that the distribution of IQ scores is more-or-less Gaussian, that is to say that it follows the bell curve. Scores on a given test in a given population have tended to rise across time throughout the history of IQ testing (the Flynn effect), so that tests need repeated renormalisation if these standards are to be maintained.
IQ scores are generally taken as an objective measure of intelligence. Because intelligence is difficult to define, the definition "Intelligence is what the IQ test measures" has been seriously proposed.
Modern ability tests produce scores for different areas (e.g., language fluency, three-dimensional thinking, etc.), with the summary score calculated as a some general measure, whose significance is disputed. Significantly, individual subtest scores correlate highly: with one another, and over diverse tests.
While it might be argued that IQ tests encode their creator's beliefs about what constitutes intelligence, analyses of an individual's scores on a wide variety of tests will reveal that they all measure a single common factor and various factors that are specific to each test. This kind of analysis has led to the theory that underlying these disparate cognitive tasks is a single factor, termed the g factor, that represents the common-sense concept of intelligence.
Opponents argue that it is much more useful to know which are the strengths and weaknesses of a person than to know that he or she holds a measureable superlative on n percent of the populace in some "general intelligence" measure. Such opponents often cite the example of two people with the same overall IQ score but very different ability profiles. However, most people have highly balanced ability profiles. Differences in subscores are greatest among the most intelligent, which may lead them to this misconception.
Others argue that IQ testing is unnecessarily narrow and have proposed wider testing that covers emotional/social intelligence, creativity, artistic intelligence, etc. Proponents of this viewpoint often say "one's IQ is merely a measure of how good one is at doing IQ tests."
The modern field of intelligence testing began with the Stanford-Binet test. It is worth noting that Alfred Binet, who created the IQ test in 1904, was aiming to identify students who could benefit from extra help in school: his assumption was that lower IQ indicated the need for more teaching, not an inability to learn. Indeed, this interpretation is still held by modern experts. The term "intelligence quotient" comes from this test, in which each student's score was the quotient of his or her tested academic age with his or her actual age. Modern IQ tests do not calculate scores in this way, but the term IQ is still in common use.
(The following numbers apply to IQ scales with a standard deviation ó = 15.) Scores between 85 and 115 are considered average—so a person scoring 95 is simply average, not below-average. The "normal" range, or range between -2 and +2 standard deviations from the mean, is between 70 and 130. A score below 70 is an indicator of mental retardation, and a score above 130 is an indicator of intellectual giftedness.
Some writers say that such scores outside the range 55 to 145 are essentially meaningless because there have not been enough people tested in those ranges to make statistically sound statements. Moreover, at such extreme values, the normal distribution is a less accurate estimate of the IQ distribution.
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