What's Your IQ?

About This Quiz

Find out if you're the next Einstein!

Intelligence quotient or IQ was a term first coined in 1912 by German psychologist William Stern, in a book where he proposed it as a way to understand relative human intelligence. Ever since then, it has passed into popular culture as a way to learn about a person's cognitive abilities. From verbal reasoning to spatial awareness to mathematical ability, IQ has been legitimized a key measure of your intellectual prowess.

That said, IQ is not the be-all and end-all of intelligence testing. It doesn't measure a person's social capacity, their emotional maturity, or their instincts. It has also been criticized for favoring certain cultural standards in a way that skews the results in favor of people with specific upbringings, rather than truly measuring their potential. It's also a startlingly weak predictor of success in life: while the top 1% of people in terms of educational and career attainment in any given field do tend to hail from the top 20% in terms of IQ, they don't correlate any more strongly than that. In fact, having too high an IQ has been correlated with lower attainment by some people who find it getting in the way of their ability to pay their dues or relate to others. It's quite clear that a decent, hardworking person will outperform a lazy genius any day. So if yours isn't the highest, that doesn't mean you're doomed: it just means you have gained one data point on the great graph of your potential.

IQ is graded on a curve, meaning that the average score is 100. Anyone scoring from 80-120 is thus probably a pretty regular sort of person - and anyone who makes over 140 is a genius level IQ. So let's take the test and see where you land!