You have a three-digit number and you are wondering what to do with it. Short answer: less than you might think, but not nothing. Here is how to read it properly.
The scale is a convention, not an absolute measure
An IQ score does not measure a quantity the way centimetres or degrees do. It reports a relative position within a reference population, on a scale built so that the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15.
In practice, in a reference population: about 68% of people fall between 85 and 115; about 95% between 70 and 130; roughly 2% above 130 and 2% below 70.
A score of 115 therefore does not mean “15% more intelligence than average”. It means “above about 84 people in 100”. It is rank information, and nothing else.
The percentile says the same thing, more clearly
“84th percentile” is immediately understandable: 84 people in 100 score below you. It has the advantage of not suggesting a physical quantity.
One trap: percentiles compress at the extremes. From 100 to 110 you move from the 50th to the 75th percentile — twenty-five people in a hundred. From 130 to 140 you move from the 98th to the 99.6th — fewer than two. Ten points do not represent the same shift in rank depending on where on the scale you count them.
Why a single number misleads
Every test carries measurement error. Even the most carefully built clinical instruments, administered face to face over two hours, report confidence intervals around ±5 points. A twenty-minute online test is more like ±10 to ±15.
Which means a result of 118 is entirely compatible with a true level of 108, or of 128. A site that tells you “your IQ is 118” and stops there is not measuring better than the others; it is simply communicating less honestly. That is why our test always shows the range beside the score.
A useful corollary: if you retake a test and score 112 after a 119, you have lost nothing. Those are the same result, seen twice through measurement noise.
Sub-scores need even more caution
An area profile rests on far fewer questions than the overall score. Nine questions per area give an indication; they do not give a measurement.
The practical rule: only draw conclusions from large gaps. Ten points between two areas is noise. Thirty points probably signals something real — a marked verbal facility, a difficulty with mental rotation — worth noting without dramatising.
What the score does not tell you
Nothing about your creativity, your ability to work with others, your persistence, your knowledge or your judgement. Those weigh heavily in real life and appear nowhere in this kind of test.
It also predicts little at the individual level. The established correlations between IQ scores and academic or professional outcomes are real but moderate: they describe group tendencies and become poor as soon as you try to predict one person’s path.
When to see a professional
If your question is concrete — unexplained school difficulties, a doubt about a particular cognitive profile, a decision to make — no online test will answer it. See a psychologist: they have standardised instruments, they observe how you solve problems as much as the result, and they put the number in context.
If the question is simply “roughly where do I sit, out of curiosity”, a test like this one does the job — as long as you read the result as an order of magnitude.