IQ 95

If you lined up 100 random adults by score, a 95 would put you at about position 37 from the bottom. That is inside the 85 to 115 band that roughly 46 million people in the UK share.

Within this range, scores a few points apart are closer together than the test's own margin of error. A 92 and a 98 could easily be the same person on different days.

This is the shared result of most of the people you know, from colleagues to friends to family. Nothing about it is a barrier to the things people usually care about.

Put 95 next to 100 and the difference is 0.33 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.

Most jobs, including skilled and professional ones, are done well by people right across this range. Employers select on experience, reliability and communication far more than on any test score.

Two people who both score 95 can have very different strengths underneath. These habits help whichever pattern you have:

• Learn in the format that suits you. Some people learn fastest by doing, others by reading or by talking it through.
• Give unfamiliar problems time. Speed is where average scores differ most, and most real decisions are not timed.
• 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 37% of people score 95 or lower. Applied to whole populations:

About 37% of people score 95 or lower, compared with 25% at 90 or lower and 50% at 100 or lower. Five points here changes the share by about 13 percentage points.

What your 95 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 95 really means somewhere from 90 to 100. Online tests are less precise than that.

Which scale was it on? Close to 100, it barely matters. Even on an SD 24 scale, a 95 converts to about 97 on the usual SD 15 scale, so you can compare it with this page almost directly.

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 95. Historians only estimate IQs for people who did something extraordinary, which skews the list. It says nothing about what famous people could actually score.

Our degree, university and job profiles carry rough IQ benchmarks. These are the ones within a few points of 95. The education figures are derived from admissions-test averages, not from IQ testing.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 95. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 95 typically score about 920 on the SAT and about 16 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.