What an IQ score actually means

An IQ score looks like a measurement of a thing — like weight, or blood pressure. It is not. It is a rank: it says where your answers sat compared with everyone else who answered the same questions, converted onto a scale where the middle of the distribution is 100.

That single fact explains most of what confuses people about their result. A score of 115 does not mean you have 15 units of something extra. It means roughly 84 people out of 100 scored below you on that test, on that day, under those conditions.

Where 100 and 15 come from

Scores are scaled so the average is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. Read as ranks, the common bands look like this:

• 85 to 115 — the middle two thirds of people. Most results land here.
• 115 to 130 — roughly the top 16% down to the top 2%.
• Above 130 — about 2 in 100.
• Below 85 — the mirror image of the same spread, and by itself it diagnoses nothing.

What the number is made of

Almost every cognitive test is a bundle of narrower tasks: pattern completion, verbal analogies, number series, a short memory span, a spatial rotation or two. Each of those is a separate ability with its own score, and the composite IQ is what you get when you flatten them into one figure.

Flattening loses the useful part. Two people can both score 112 while one is carried by verbal reasoning and dragged down by memory, and the other is the exact opposite. Same headline number, opposite advice about what to do next.

That is why the report here breaks the run into five areas — logical, spatial, memory, verbal and speed — and shows the profile beside the score. See how the five areas are scored

What it cannot tell you

• Whether you will be good at a particular job. Correlations at the population level say nothing reliable about one person.
• Anything clinical. A score is not a diagnosis, and no online test is an assessment by a psychologist.
• A fixed ceiling. Scores move with sleep, stress, practice, motivation and the test itself — and a single run is one noisy sample of all of that.

How to read your own result

Treat the composite as context and the profile as the information. The band tells you roughly where you sit; the five separate scores tell you which part of your thinking is doing the work and which one is quietly costing you. The second question is the one you can act on.

And measure again later. A single number is a snapshot with noise in it. Two runs a week apart, with the same test, tell you far more than one run interpreted very confidently.