Is an IQ of 75 good?
An IQ of 75 is higher than 5% of people, on a scale where 100 is the mean and 15 is one standard deviation. That is 1 in 21, and 1.67 standard deviations below the mean.
BorderlineWAIS-IV descriptive band for 75. Newer manuals use softer words for the same ranges.
IQ 75 by group
Percentile
Where the bands fall
Percentile is the share of people who score below this IQ. “1 in X” counts the rarer side: people at or beyond this value above the median, at or under it below. IQ scores are normed to a normal curve by construction, so the percentile follows from the score alone.
What this means
- In a school of 1,000 pupils, about 952 would score 75 or higher.
- Mensa admits the top 2%, which is about 131 on this scale. 75 is 56 points short.
- Online IQ tests are not normed on a population sample. A score from one of those is a guess in a confident font.
Questions
- Is an IQ of 75 good?
- An IQ of 75 is higher than 5% of people. That is the bottom tenth on the scale. The WAIS-IV calls 70 to 79 "borderline".
- How rare is an IQ of 75?
- About 1 in 21 people score 75 or lower. That is 1.7 standard deviations below the mean of 100.
- What does an IQ of 75 mean?
- IQ tests are scored so that the population mean is 100 and one standard deviation is 15. About 68% of people score between 85 and 115, and 95% between 70 and 130. 75 sits in the "borderline" band. The number says where you rank on a test, not how your life goes.
Source: Wechsler scale definition: mean 100, SD 15 (WAIS-IV, Pearson 2008). Percentiles on this page are our estimate from a normal distribution with the stated mean and SD.
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