IQ 58

58 is below the middle of the curve, but it is far from unusual. Around 170,000 people in the UK would score 58 or lower on the same scale. It works out at 2.80 standard deviations under the mean, in the band this site calls Below Average.

A score under 70 on a single online test does not mean anything clinical. Only a qualified professional, such as a clinical or educational psychologist, can assess that, using supervised tests and a look at everyday functioning.

Plenty of valuable skills are learned mainly through practice. Trades, care work, hospitality, sport, driving and music all reward repetition and experience, and people keep improving at them for decades.

If you want to understand your result, think about which questions felt hard. Running out of time, losing track of a rule and second-guessing yourself are different problems, and each one has a different fix.

Think of 58 as the middle of a window. On a second attempt the same person could plausibly land at 63, which is higher than 0.68% of people, or at 53. That is before counting the extra noise an unsupervised online test adds.

Online tests are not normed the way clinical tests are. Their scores are estimates, and the people who take them are not a representative sample of the population.

Your screen, your connection, background noise and interruptions all affect a timed test. A phone in a busy room is a very different test from a quiet desk.

Small day-to-day changes are enough to move a score around 58. A shift of 5 points, from 58 to 63, would move you from the 0.26th to the 0.68th percentile, so it helps to know what causes those swings.

• Stress and mood. Worry takes up working memory. People who feel anxious about tests often score below their usual level.
• Familiarity. People who have seen matrix-style puzzles before tend to do better on them. That is a practice effect, not a change in underlying ability.
• Timing and comfort. Hunger, a headache or testing late at night can all pull a score down on the day.

If IQ follows the standard bell curve, 0.3% of people score 58 or lower. Here is what that share means across whole populations:

Scoring 58 or lower is about 1 in 391. At 63 or lower it becomes 1 in 147, and at 53 or lower 1 in 1,157, which shows how quickly the curve fills up towards the middle.

What your 58 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 58 really means somewhere from 53 to 63. 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 58 stands as it is. If the report used SD 16 it equals about 61, and if it used SD 24 about 74. The percentile follows the converted number.

Nobody famous has a verified IQ in most cases, and retrospective estimates are only made for a narrow group.

The estimates on our historical profiles run from 115 to 250, so none lands close to 58. Historians only estimate IQs for people who did something extraordinary, which skews the list. It says nothing about what famous people could actually score.

How 58 stacks up against the scores just around it and the round numbers people usually ask about. Each score links to its own page.