IQ 122

Only about 1 in 14 people score 122 or higher. That puts you 7 points into the band between one and two standard deviations above the mean, where this site uses the label Superior.

This is a common range among people in academic and professional work, but it is far from a requirement. Plenty of people outside it do the same jobs well.

The gap between you and the average person is real but modest. On any single task, effort, experience and knowledge can easily outweigh it.

No job requires a 122, and no score guarantees one. What research does show is that general reasoning ability predicts training speed and job performance, most strongly in complex roles. Large meta-analyses such as Schmidt and Hunter (1998) are the usual reference.

If you are choosing a path, treat 122 as a reason to take on demanding material, not as a filter on which options are open to you.

Fields with long training, such as medicine or law, are well within reach at 122. Admissions and licensing depend on exams, grades and persistence, not on an IQ score.

Compared with someone at 100, a person at 122 is 1.47 standard deviations quicker on the kind of reasoning IQ tests sample. Day to day that usually looks like needing fewer examples to grasp a new idea, not like knowing things without effort.

• You tend to spot the pattern in a problem sooner, especially with numbers, diagrams or rules.
• New tools and apps feel intuitive faster, because you infer how they work.
• Quick reasoning does not protect against bias. It can make a confident wrong answer more persuasive.

If IQ follows the standard bell curve, 7.1% of people score 122 or higher. Here is what that share means across whole populations:

An IQ of 122 or higher is 1.8 times rarer than 117 or higher, and 127 or higher is 2 times rarer again. At this point on the curve, each extra point makes a score about 14% rarer.

What your 122 could really be. Treat any single score as the centre of a range. For a good supervised test, about 5 points either side is typical, so 122 really means somewhere from 117 to 127. Online tests are less precise than that.

Which scale was it on? A 122 reported on an SD 16 scale converts to about 121 on the usual SD 15 scale, and one from an SD 24 scale (seen in some Cattell-style results) to about 114. Check which scale your score report used.

Retrospective estimates for historical figures rarely go this low, because they are only made for people with exceptional achievements. A few sit near 122. Every figure below is a retrospective estimate, not a measured score. Open a profile to see the evidence and how confident anyone can be.

Our degree, university and job profiles carry rough IQ benchmarks. These are the ones within a few points of 122. The education figures are derived from admissions-test averages, not from IQ testing.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 122. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 122 typically score about 1310 on the SAT and about 26 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.