IQ 148

148 is 3.20 standard deviations above average, in the range usually called highly gifted. Only about 1 in 1,455 people score this high or higher. It sits 3 points past the 145 mark and 12 short of 160. This site labels scores from 145 as genius, but that is an informal label, not a clinical category.

The Triple Nine Society's top 0.1% line is about 146 on this scale, and 148 clears it. As with any society, membership needs a supervised test, not an online result.

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

People who score around 148, and the teachers who work with them, often describe some of the following. Treat it as a set of possibilities, not a profile:

• Interests can be intense and deep, sometimes at the cost of everything else.
• It can be hard to judge what is obvious to other people, so explaining clearly takes practice.
• 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 148, 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 2. That is why scores this high carry more uncertainty.

Short online tests, including ours, are best at telling you roughly where you are. Treat a 148 from one as "well above 140" rather than an exact figure.

Scale matters too. If your 148 was reported on an SD 24 scale, it is about 130 on the usual SD 15 scale, and on an SD 16 scale about 145.

On a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, about 0.069% of people score 148 or higher. Applied to whole populations:

An IQ of 148 or higher is 3 times rarer than 143 or higher, and 153 or higher is 3.3 times rarer again. At this point on the curve, each extra point makes a score about 26% rarer.

What your 148 could really be. Even a good supervised test has a margin of error of roughly 5 points either side. A true score anywhere from 143 to 153 would be consistent with a 148, which spans the 99.79th to the 99.98th percentile. Short online tests have wider margins.

Which scale was it on? Most modern tests use a standard deviation of 15, which is what this page assumes. If your 148 came from a test using an SD of 16, it is about 145 on the SD 15 scale. From an SD 24 scale, used by some Cattell-style reports, it is about 130.

Scientists, composers and philosophers often receive estimates in this range. These sit near 148. None of these are test scores. They are estimates from biographical evidence, and each profile explains its basis.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 148. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 148 typically score about 1590 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.