Is 145 a good IQ?

145 is 3.00 standard deviations above average, in the range usually called highly gifted. Only about 1 in 741 people score this high or higher. It sits exactly 3 standard deviations above the mean, one of the landmark points on the curve. This site labels scores from 145 as genius, but that is an informal label, not a clinical category.

At this height one or two answers matter a lot. Many tests have only a handful of very hard items separating 145 from 160, so a single extra correct answer can move the score several points.

A very high score is not a forecast. Eminence depends on years of work, opportunity, collaborators and luck as much as on ability.

There is no single experience of a 145. The points below are patterns often described by people in this range and by those who teach them, not a checklist.

• It can be hard to judge what is obvious to other people, so explaining clearly takes practice.
• Perfectionism and overthinking come up often in first-hand accounts.
• In children, reasoning can run years ahead of age while emotional and physical development stay on schedule. Educators call this asynchrony.

To check a score of 145, a test would need plenty of people at that level in its norm group. With a typical 2,200-person sample, it would expect about 3. That is why scores this high carry more uncertainty.

Ceiling effects set in when a test runs out of hard questions. Strong test-takers then bunch at the top and the score stops separating them.

Online scores this high deserve extra caution. Short tests have few very hard questions, so luck on one or two of them can decide whether you see 140 or 145.

Scoring 145 or higher is a 0.13% share of everyone. Scaled up to whole populations, that works out as:

Going from 140 to 145 makes a score 2.8 times rarer, and going on to 150 multiplies the rarity by another 3.1. Near 145, each single point adds about 25% to the rarity.

What your 145 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 145 really means somewhere from 140 to 150. Online tests are less precise than that.

Which scale was it on? Score reports do not always say. On the common SD 15 scale your 145 stands as it is. If the report used SD 16 it equals about 142, and if it used SD 24 about 128. The percentile follows the converted number.

Scientists, composers and philosophers often receive estimates in this range. These sit near 145. Every figure below is a retrospective estimate, not a measured score. Open a profile to see the evidence and how confident anyone can be.

Rough benchmarks from our profiles that sit within a few points of 145. Degree and university figures are estimates derived from admissions-test averages, not measured IQs.

145 is exactly three standard deviations above the mean, about 1 in 741 people. It is where this site's genius label starts, though no modern test uses genius as a formal category.

From here upward, each point is a bigger jump in rarity, and each extra correct answer on a hard item moves the score further.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 145. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 145 typically score about 1570 on the SAT and about 35 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.