A reader wrote the following:
Hello PP, I was wondering if you could give a rough approximation of my IQ based on scores from different tests I’ve taken. I’ve never considered myself all that smart, and writing is not something I’m especially fond of so please excuse any grammatical errors.
SAT (taken in 2014): Math 660, Reading 630, Writing 620
ASVAB (2016): 96th percentile, GT Score 129
Queendom.com Classical IQ Test (December 23, 2018): 140 Overall, 137 Crystallized Intelligence, 147 Fluid IntelligenceI’m gonna post some pictures of the test scores below.
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From the SAT picture you can also see my PSAT scores and a previous SAT score. The other scores are average. For context, I was unfamiliar with nearly all the formulas needed when taking the PSAT both times. I’ve also always been a very anxious test taker; literally shaking and sweating in a 70 degree room. I was also diagnosed with anemia around this time which might also be a factor. Weighing in at about 120 lbs standing 5’10, I was a walking stick. Was also put on free lunch at school and my mom was on food stamps, welfare, the whole gamut. My parents were pretty indifferent. On the first SAT test I took, a friend of mine recommended taking an adderall pill. This led to profuse sweating, blurry vision, frequent bathroom breaks, and uncertainty in all my answers. Before my second round with the SAT I tried studying but was never able to sit down and do it. Instead, I just familiarized myself with the test so I knew what section was gonna come next and knew the time constraints. I know studies show people don’t usually increase their SAT scores by more than 20 points per section, but I’ve personally heard of dozens of people increasing their scores by 100’s of points per section by taking multiple practice tests and learning the tricks on the SAT. Plus, some of my friends started studying for the SAT years in advance. Some as early as middle school.
When I took the ASVAB it was right after a hot and long 2 hour bus ride to the MEPS center. This was in California during the summer, and they didn’t feed us until after we took the test. I also didn’t really put forth my best effort because I was joining the Army and was kinda lackadaisical about it. It was pretty easy in all honesty though.
I heard about Queendom from Aaron Clarey on youtube and he said it gives a pretty good estimate on IQ because it averages from a pool of all people that took it. It also has some studies showing it correlates pretty well with the RAIS test. I took it in about 30 minutes although I’m skeptical because of how high it put me. In short, based on my previous scores where would you rank me? Is it possible my IQ went up from when I was a teenager? I also weigh about 170 now and have adopted the ketogenic diet. That’s one of the main differences between now and then.
Aaron Clarey’s video on Queendom’s IQ test:
Using my formula (IQ = 0.0566(SAT score) + 20.15094) your SAT scores of 1910 and 1660 (out of 2400) equate to IQs of 128 and 114 respectively (U.S. norms). Similarly, your 96th percentile on the ASVAB equates to an IQ of 126.
Given your health issues and test anxiety, I’d probably ignore the IQ 114 you got the first time you took the SAT as an outlier, and judge your teenage IQ based on a composite of your second SAT score (IQ 128) and your ASVAB score (IQ 126). Given the high correlation between these two tests, the composite score would be about 129.
As for your 140 overall IQ on the Queendom; this might be because the Queendom needs to improve its norms. The below chart shows that a sample of college students who took both the RIAS and the Queendom scored 111.12 (SD 8.35) and 117.88 (SD 11.5) respectively.
Evaluating the Concurrent Validity of Three Web-Based IQ Tests and the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales (RIAS)
Given that the RIAS is an extremely well-normed test, this implies that Queendom gives scores that are (a) too high, and (b) too extreme.
To equate Queendom’s distribution with the RIAS distribution we must convert the Queendom score into a Z score with respect to this reference group that took both tests, and then multiply it by the reference group’s RIAS SD (Standard Deviation) and then add to their RIAS mean.
So since your Queendom score of 140 has a Z score of 1.92 in this reference group, it equates to an IQ of 1.92(8.35) + 111.12 = 127
So it seems your IQ has been quite stable and extremely high since your teenage years. An IQ in the high 120s puts you in the same range as U.S. presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs and (on non-college admission tests) the most elite university students on the planet.
Pumpkin Person 
What’s the difference between the RIAS and the RAIT? Which one is better? I scored equivalent to 110-115 on both SATs and Queendom, but I think I did well (120-130) on the RAIT.
PP, what is the standard deviation of student IQ at top US universities like Harvard?
If measured by the test used to select them (i.e. SAT for undergrads) it might be very small, but on other tests, the best data on the subject was obtained by Harvard scholar Shelley H Carson and her colleagues who had an abbreviated version of the WAIS-R given to 86 “Harvard undergraduates (33 men, 53 women), with a mean age of 20.7 years (SD 3.3)… All were recruited from sign-up sheets posted on campus. Participants were paid an hourly rate…The mean IQ of the sample was 128.1 points (SD 10.3), with a range of 97 to 148 points.”
Of course this sample might underestimate their IQs and the SD because of ceiling bumping on the WAIS and an oversampling of women & non-STEM students (as pumpkinhead noted). On the other hand it might overestimate their IQs because the test they took was 25-years-old and so norms inflated by flynn effect.
Thanks!
Pumpkin you need to stop being biased in the way you present your data. your readers will falsely assume that everyone with a hi IQ will achieve large amounts of success. you should put a disclaimer on these posts.
That’s true. Just because most extremely successful people have high IQs does not mean most high IQ people will be extremely successful.
“Just because most extremely successful people have high IQs”
No they dont. Stop making up stuff.
“An IQ in the high 120s puts you in the same range as U.S. presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs and (on non-college admission tests) the most elite university students on the planet.”
Your statement should be redacted on the premise of it being biased and irrelevant to the post.
Also another disclaimer you should put at the top of your posts is that Correlation between IQ and financial success is lower or higher depending on which country in the world you live in. So for example in Canada where your from, 76% of the population works in the service industry and this industry contributes 70.7% of Canada’s G.D.P. Which is the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada
The service industry includes accounting, trades like professional consulting,mechanic or plumber services, computer services, restaurants, tourism, etc. Hence, the service Industry is one where no goods are produced.
In layman’s terms 70% of Canada’s GDP is literal brain power. So of course in Canada one’s IQ is going to be heavily correlated with their financial success.
In contrast, if one were to live in a country like Mexico where 61.9% of the population works in the service industry, where this industry accounts for 59.8% of Mexico’s total G.D.P. The correlation between I.Q. and financial success would be much lower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Mexico
In summary the correlation between IQ and financial success is lower or higher depending on which country in the world you live in. Pumpkin if you would like I can make a post ranking all 211 countries from where I.Q. is most important to financial success to least.
sorry not much lower, moderately
I would rather see actual studies predicting IQs in different countries rather than making assumptions based on what industries are prominent.
The only data I’ve seen suggests IQ might better predict income in the U.S. than in more socialist European countries.
If your an high school kid with IQ of 128, you’ve got 1 chance in 100 to get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton instead of 1 in 5000 if your just in the 85-115 bracket. That’s still be bright
It would be interesting to know the relationship between fluid intelligence and the ability to get into highly prestigious positions (CEOs, POTUS, high ranking cabinet positions, senatorial…).
Fluid verbal ability must be super important, and then for decision-making, you have to have a great working memory because that’s what decision-making is all about. I would bet working memory is the most important function, in terms of cognitive profile, of the human mind. You have to have an absolutely wicked working memory to do anything really significant because it’s all about manipulating ideas in your head at once and then making decisions based on it, like knowing the right things to say. Speech in general is dictated by working memory, as you need to know how to appropriately apply the correct words at the correct time.
Savantism is largely due to large working memory spans. Working memory in some ways does seem to be the most critical part of intelligence (although it’s processing speed that correlates most highly with lifespan and certain other biological measures). Someone should find more research on this…
Personally, I wonder about the average working memory of different races. I bet blacks outperform themselves on other cognitive tasks in terms of working memory. That’s why they make very good fluid speakers, but are not very bright when it comes to interpreting the ideas or comments of others. Asians, in my observation, underperform in verbal working memory and overperform in mathematical working memory in relation to their overall cognitive abilities. So I’m not sure, it definitely comes down to how well you can hold multiple ideas in your head and apply them to create coherent, impactful concepts.
Me personally, I scored in the early 2000s on the SAT. PSAT was a 198 when I took it in 10th grade. The catch, however, is that I took the SAT three times. I increased my math score every time, dramatically improving between my first and third scores, but failed to increase my verbal. Writing has no relation to IQ anyway, so we can throw that out. Verbal was consistently between 710 and 730. I’ve heard verbal is mostly crystallized and therefore has little flexibility in terms of practice. Math is a lot more fluid reasoning so it’s malleable in terms of practice.
My mother has multiple PhDs in a STEM-related field. However, I think her memory and reading comprehension are off the charts, but her IQ might be relative to 125. When looking at the Flynn effect, not only do you see a rise in IQ, but also in episodic and semantic memory, according to a Wikipedia search on the matter. That means that long-term memory and short-term memory are both increasing. I would say long-term memory has a lot more to do with brain size as recall of past events involve having bigger brains, particularly a larger hippocampus. This can be attributed to nutrition. However, I think that short-term recall involves more associative thinking, which has a lot more to do with wiring of the brain. Therefore, we can characterize some parts of our cognitive profile becoming increasingly complex to genetics, or better childhood development. Caveat, this is all speculation, like most of my theories.
I have a big head . I have no recall at all. But I may be an outlier.
I absolutely believe in neuroplasticity. Most of our actions are done subconsciously and can be trained to happen. To keep towards the more scientific side of all this and not sway towards the philosophical and spiritual ideas I may have about cognition, I think the human brain is constantly aware of the different outcomes that are possible and is making real-time calculations on what seems to be the best outcome. This involves using all datum that the human mind can store and already has and then applying real-time decisions based on what’s happening. That’s why the human brain is so much like a computer, because it’s always simulating different outcomes and generating as many outcomes as possible, then choosing which one to take. In relation to neuroplasticity, every new learned information our brain gathers gets stored and we use that as a heuristic for making decisions from then on. So crystallized intelligence is an imprinted form of information we’ve gathered, and fluid intelligence is the way in which we sort out information and the mechanism behind our decision-making.
The thing is though, there’s no such as thing as free will. The human mind has already decided on what is going to happen milliseconds before the actual thought crosses the human conscious and action is taken (or maybe it was the opposite way around, I don’t really remember?). Anyways, the point is that the human mind reflexively acts according to simulations that occur in the brain. Intelligence tests are literally just focusing on our ability to manipulate different thoughts in our head, apply them to our subconscious, force out an answer into our conscious, and then rinse and repeat. Maybe that’s too literal for some to really believe, but I’m confident it’s the correct method of establishing the parameters for cognition.
“Most of our actions are done subconscious”
Nonsense. Actions are intentional.
“there’s no such as thing as free will”
P1 If we are morally responsible, we have free will.
P2 We are morally responsible.
C We have free will (modus ponens, P1, P2).
There are, moreover, seemingly unanswerable arguments that, if they are correct, demonstrate the existence of moral responsibility entails the existence of free will, and, therefore, if free will does not exist, moral responsibility does not exist either. It is, however, evident that moral responsibility does exist: if there were no such thing as moral responsibility, nothing would be anyone’s fault, and it is evident that there are states of affairs to which one can point and say, correctly, to certain people: That’s your fault. (van Inwagen, How to Think
“and it is evident that there are states of affairs to which one can point and say, correctly, to certain people: That’s your fault. ”
Why privilege one cause out of many?
I’m a personal believer that the Universe recurs over and over. I think it has to do with the Big Bang expanding the Universe, then contracting, and doing that over and over until there are intersections between the two. But that’s just a personal belief from personal experiences of deja vu, experiencing precognitive thought patterns such as dreaming and seeing the events unfold in the future, etc. So that’s why I am not a believer in free will. I think our realities have unfolded already, it just contracts and goes back and starts over. But I have no real opinions on an afterlife, though I think it may have something to do with the multiverse if any should exist.
RR,
“Nonsense. Actions are intentional.”
Most people do not use the term “actions” in the way that you are. I believe you’re being semantic.
“P1 If we are morally responsible, we have free will.
P2 We are morally responsible.
C We have free will (modus ponens, P1, P2).”
1. If we are morally responsible, we have free will.
2. moral responsibility requires universal laws of morality.
3. No laws exist.
4 no one is moraly responsible.
5. free will doesn’t exist
Why do you believ free will conflicts with ethical subjectivism?
“if there were no such thing as moral responsibility, nothing would be anyone’s fault,”
There is always a cause and an effect. That doesn’t mean a cause’s label is anything but a subjective prescription.
I think there is a multiverse and when one universe expands another contracts and vice versa. This goes on until all universes achieve quantum unification.
“Most people do not use the term “actions” in the way that you are. I believe you’re being semantic.”
So what? Actions are intentional and behavior is dispositional.
Nothing is anyone’s fault?
you’re playing word games. In the English language behavior can most certainly be intentional:
https://psychologydictionary.org/goal-directed-behavior/
Actions are goal directed. Not behavior.
Maybe in RRese but not in English
How can behavior be intentional?
Because behavior is what you do & you do many things on purpose
“Doing things on purpose” is called “action.”
In common language behavior & action are synonyms. Both can be intentional or unintentional.
They’re distinct.
No they’re not, you’re just obsessing over some idiosyncratic defenition some philosopher made.
Why aren’t they distinct, PP?
Because people use those words interchangeably. Words only have the meaning we as a culture assign to them.
Define “action” and “behavior.”
What you do
Also, “goal-directed behavior” doesn’t exist. You mean “goal-directed action.”
Sigh
There are no states of affairs where we can, rightly, point to and say it was someone’s fault?
Humans have intentional states. Morality is an intentional. By virtue of morality being an intentional, we have a choice in the action we take.
“So what?”
…So your criticism is vacuous, it didn’t refute anything. He clearly was using “action” as a synonym with just doing anything in general.
What exactly justifies your definition of “Action”.
“Nothing is anyone’s fault?”
I usually do not prescribe “fault” with intrinsic moral wrongness when I use the term. To me if something is “your fault”, that is equivalent to saying you are the cause of the reaction at hand. It says nothing of whether your action was bad or not. Whats with you and the semantics?
“Sigh”
Just know that I understand your pain.
This is quite an amusing conversation.
Don’t ask me why – but I was talking to a vegetarian Christian woman. Needless to say, bad mistake. (I’m a meat,-eating atheist.)
I am a vegetarian theist, talk to me what you want to talk about.
Do you think it would be a good idea to use real IQ tests for college/university selection? Not personally administred tests, but adaptive computerized tests like https://www.ixly.com/testen/general-intelligence-adaptive-capacity-test/. A number of these tests are already in use among companies, so why not use them for college admission? The risk is of course even these are not immune to excessive prepping.