- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
IQ tests are supposed to determine your intelligence quotient. they aren't supposed to be a measure of your education/aquired information, but rather a measure of your ability to aquire new information. of course, we all have our aptitudes, but the idea here is that those with higher IQs should have a broader range of aptitudes due to the fact that they should have a generally easier time learning different things.
if i remember correctly, the score for genius is 140+, but it's been a long time, so i'm not sure.
last i heard--as of a year ago or so--the person believed to have the highest IQ is a bouncer in New York. he has some other side job, but at the time i read about him, he was saying he had no desire to get into research work or anything else. he cooked up some theory while he was checking IDs and it wound up getting published and causing a little bit of a stir in the physics community. supposedly he's around 205...
there were chinese twins who were also supposed to be around 202 at one point, haven't heard anything about them for a few years...
...and there was a freakish instance where some missionaries in africa stumbled onto a non-english speaking african man who had found a math textbook near the site of a plane crash and from a geometry level book written in a language he didn't understand had pieced together enough that at the time they found him, he had reached the same levels of mastery over the subject of mathematics as the foremost thinkers in the world. think Goodwill Hunting, except that unlike Matt Damon in the movie, this dude literally put it together from a book written in a language he didn't understand. at all. he lived in a mud hut. that is mind blowing. this was a long time ago, i can't remember how long exactly--but i believe 20+ years ago, probably closer to 40. something i read about a long time ago and have forgotten some of the details of.
lots of confusion about the subject of IQs...i have a boss who swears up and down he's over 200, but the guy is a total moron. the subject came up when he was mentioning that my brother (Bgrngod on XBL, btw) was pretty bright and asked what i thought his IQ was. i told him in all honesty that i would peg Kyle (my brother) around a 135-140 if i had to take a guess and he laughed and said that was average and that he himself was over 200. this kind of thing is why this subject often turns into something silly.
some marks, and again these are going off of old memory:
35 or below = retardation...
35-60 approx range for being 'challenged' with varied degrees of severity
65-115 would be a broad range of functional folks
115+ would be above average...
130+ would be gifted
160+ would be probably the classical definition of 'genius', meaning extremely gifted and prodigious.
200+ would be super genius and rare to such a degree that the number of folks at this level could probably be counted on one hand at any given time.