IQ 67

67 is below the middle of the curve, but it is far from unusual. Around 950,000 people in the UK would score 67 or lower on the same scale. It works out at 2.20 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.

A result in this range often reflects the test as much as the person. Timed abstract puzzles are unfamiliar to many adults, especially anyone who left education a while ago or who learned in a different language.

Think of 67 as the middle of a window. On a second attempt the same person could plausibly land at 72, which is higher than 3.1% of people, or at 62. That is before counting the extra noise an unsupervised online test adds.

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.

Time limits matter. Some people reason accurately but slowly, and a short, timed test turns that into a lower number than an untimed task would.

The same person can score 62 one week and 72 the next. Most of that swing comes from the conditions on the day rather than any change in ability:

• Stress and mood. Worry takes up working memory. People who feel anxious about tests often score below their usual level.
• Language. Questions that rely on words or written rules favour native speakers. Visual puzzles reduce this effect but do not remove it.
• 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.

On a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, about 1.4% of people score 67 or lower. Applied to whole populations:

About 1.4% of people score 67 or lower, compared with 0.6% at 62 or lower and 3.1% at 72 or lower. Five points here changes the share by about 2 percentage points.

What your 67 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 67 really means somewhere from 62 to 72. 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 67 stands as it is. If the report used SD 16 it equals about 69, and if it used SD 24 about 79. 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 67. Historians only estimate IQs for people who did something extraordinary, which skews the list. It says nothing about what famous people could actually score.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 67. Every row links to that score's page.