IQ 147

In a town of 100,000 people, the bell curve expects only about 86 at 147 or higher. That rarity, about 1 in 1,157, is what puts 147 in the highly gifted range.

Highly gifted is mostly an education term. For a child it usually signals needing more than standard enrichment, such as acceleration or specialist teaching.

People this rare can find it takes effort to meet intellectual peers. University departments, clubs and communities built around hard problems help.

There is no single experience of a 147. The points below are patterns often described by people in this range and by those who teach them, not a checklist.

• Complex ideas can click after one explanation, which makes slow-paced teaching feel frustrating.
• Perfectionism and overthinking come up often in first-hand accounts.
• None of this is guaranteed. Many people at this level feel ordinary most of the time.

Measurement gets harder the rarer a score is. A 147 is rare enough that a standard norm sample of about 2,200 people holds only around 2 people at that level or above.

Margins of error widen at the extremes, so a reported score here is less precise than the roughly 5 points either side that is typical near the middle.

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 142 or 147.

Scoring 147 or higher is a 0.086% share of everyone. Scaled up to whole populations, that works out as:

Going from 142 to 147 makes a score 3 times rarer, and going on to 152 multiplies the rarity by another 3.3. Near 147, each single point adds about 26% to the rarity.

What your 147 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 147 really means somewhere from 142 to 152. 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 147 stands as it is. If the report used SD 16 it equals about 144, and if it used SD 24 about 129. The percentile follows the converted number.

Scientists, composers and philosophers often receive estimates in this range. These sit near 147. 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 147. The education figures are derived from admissions-test averages, not from IQ testing.

The scores one and five points either side of 147, plus the round numbers from 100 to 150, side by side. Tap any score for its full page.

People with an IQ of 147 typically score about 1580 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.