IQ 93

About 68% of people score between 85 and 115, and 93 sits inside that range, 7 points below the exact midpoint of 100. Around 32% of people score at or below 93 and 68% score higher. It sits 8 points past the 85 mark and 7 short of 100.

Average is not a polite word for mediocre. It is where the test is designed to place the typical adult, and it is the level that most schooling, jobs and everyday tasks are built around.

Most of the difference between people with average scores comes from other things: knowledge, experience, habits and how often they practise the kind of thinking a task needs.

Put 93 next to 100 and the difference is 0.47 of a standard deviation. On timed abstract puzzles that shows as being a touch slower or less accurate; outside the test, other things matter far more.

Where a score like this shows is mainly in speed on unfamiliar, timed problems. Given time, familiar material and a clear goal, people across the average range reach the same answers.

Being in the average range says nothing about ambition. Careers, qualifications and creative work are open across it, and many people in it are highly skilled in their field.

Two people who both score 93 can have very different strengths underneath. These habits help whichever pattern you have:

• Lean on structure. Checklists, notes and routines free up working memory for the hard part of a problem.
• Learn in the format that suits you. Some people learn fastest by doing, others by reading or by talking it through.
• Go deep in one area. Expertise lets people reason quickly in their own field whatever their overall score.

On a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, about 32% of people score 93 or lower. Applied to whole populations:

The curve fills up quickly towards the middle. Moving from 93 to 98 adds about 13 percentage points of people at or below you, and moving down to 88 removes about 11.

What your 93 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 93 really means somewhere from 88 to 98. Online tests are less precise than that.

Which scale was it on? Most modern tests use a standard deviation of 15, which is what this page assumes. If your 93 came from a test using an SD of 16, it is about 93 on the SD 15 scale. From an SD 24 scale, used by some Cattell-style reports, it is about 96.

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 93. 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 93. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 93 typically score about 900 on the SAT and about 15 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.