IQ 73

On the standard scale, 73 sits 27 points under 100. You scored higher than 3.6% of people, and about 1 in 28 people score at this level or lower. It sits 3 points past the 70 mark and 12 short of 85. The label for this part of the curve is Below Average.

A score in the 70s on one online test is not a diagnosis of anything. Only a qualified professional, such as a clinical or educational psychologist, can assess anything clinical, and they never rely on a single number.

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.

Retest gains of a few points are well documented once a format is familiar. First attempts at any unfamiliar kind of test tend to be the least representative.

Think of 73 as the middle of a window. On a second attempt the same person could plausibly land at 78, which is higher than 7.1% of people, or at 68. 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.

Small day-to-day changes are enough to move a score around 73. A shift of 5 points, from 73 to 78, would move you from the 3.6th to the 7.1st percentile, so it helps to know what causes those swings.

• Sleep. A short night reliably hurts working memory and attention, the two things timed puzzles lean on hardest.
• 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.

Scoring 73 or lower is a 3.6% share of everyone. Scaled up to whole populations, that works out as:

Scoring 73 or lower is about 1 in 28. At 78 or lower it becomes 1 in 14, and at 68 or lower 1 in 61, which shows how quickly the curve fills up towards the middle.

What your 73 could really be. Even a good supervised test has a margin of error of roughly 5 points either side. A true score anywhere from 68 to 78 would be consistent with a 73, which spans the 1.6th to the 7.1st 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 73 came from a test using an SD of 16, it is about 75 on the SD 15 scale. From an SD 24 scale, used by some Cattell-style reports, it is about 83.

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

Our historical estimates start at 115, so nobody sits close to 73. That is not because famous people score higher. Estimates are only attempted for people with extraordinary records, which leaves ordinary scores unrepresented.

How 73 stacks up against the scores just around it and the round numbers people usually ask about. Each score links to its own page.

People with an IQ of 73 typically score about 700 on the SAT and about 11 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.