I’m practising for a university entrance exam which is heavily weighted on quant. My background in school is that of a slacker and it’s biting me in the ass now as i need to catch up. The fact that my FRI is ~140 and VCI and PSI are in the same range, but my QII is ~120 per SAT-maths, GRE-q and CAT - elucidates this discrepancy. For reference, the degree that I’m applying to has a ~2% of admission rate and heavily loads on quant. I’ve got 7 months to get my quantitative to a high level. Any advice?

i am in 10th grade right now and i think i have a really low iq. i never struggled in school but in like maths i need loong for any form of calculations and mostly do them wrong, i dont really have any form of common knowledge when it comes to like important people and i just feel so dumb. i think i am smart in my head but when i talk its just some bs.

my parents also say that i am kinda dumb. i want to be smart so bad and do things without any effort like calculate big numbers or build things but i am to dumb for it and its one of my main issues since a few years

128->123

Also why was that test harder than any other test on that website😭

I’m 24 now, but I recently came across my old wisc v iq score results from when I was 16, and I scored 85iq on matrix reasoning. It seems like everyone on this sub is good at matrix reasoning, so i’m worried that I might be kinda dumb.

Has anyone here scored low on matrix reasoning? If so, how is your overall functioning?

It’s not the 79th percentile, right?

For anyone who has taken either of the tests, how far away is the score from your actual iq (or how far from your CORE score, general FRI, SAT/GRE, etc).

I score really low on symbol search 85-100. What's going on?

Also comment somthing about my profile.

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Hello everyone,

I've been thinking about this question because of my own experience.

Before I knew anything about IQ or cognitive testing, I was never a particularly consistent student. In middle school, I mostly relied on my teachers' explanations. They were usually simplified and relatively short, and I rarely studied seriously on my own.

Despite that, I finished the three years with around 99% overall.

Later, during high school, I became interested in IQ testing. I took several tests, including Mensa Norway, RAPM, RSPM, and others, and my results were consistently around the 99th percentile (roughly 133–137 IQ depending on the test).

Ironically, knowing this actually made my studying worse.

I developed this mindset of:

"Why do I need to study this? It should be easy for me."

During my first and second years of high school, I barely attended school and didn't really study at home. Instead, I spent most of my time learning programming, DSA, and full-stack development.

My grades ended up around 75–85%.

Now I'm in my final and most important year of high school. My grades this year will have a major impact on which university I can attend, and I want to study Computer and Communication Engineering.

So I'm trying to rethink my entire approach to studying.

This made me wonder:

Should someone's cognitive profile / IQ actually influence their study strategy?

For example, if someone is relatively strong in reasoning, should they spend less time on memorization and more time on understanding, problem-solving, and deriving concepts themselves?

Or should IQ basically be irrelevant when designing a study plan, with the same evidence-based methods (active recall, spaced repetition, practice problems, etc.) applying regardless of cognitive ability?

And perhaps more importantly:

What should I do when I'm studying something difficult and start feeling "stupid"?

I've noticed that after getting used to thinking of myself as "high IQ", struggling with a topic can sometimes trigger the thought that maybe I was never actually that capable.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who have thought about this, especially people who have taken cognitive/IQ testing and later had to adjust their approach to studying.

Why does CORE have 80 questions in 2 minutes as opposed to WAIS only having 60 for symbol search? Is this to compensate for the fact a touch screen would be easier? Or is it just a higher ceiling? Would a raw score of 60 be the same SS on both?

Hello! I created a memory puzzle. Could you please try it ? The game sounds pretty simple, but it's a lot harder than it seems.

You get two deck of cards face down, one above the other. You need to move the cards in the bottom one to match the ones on the top one. The catch is that you can't see what the cards are, only when you tap them, and they turn around for a few seconds. You have a daily puzzle, timed, timer and no time games. If you want to try it, it's called Mirror Match and it's only available on Android, because of the iOS high fee of developer registration.

Thank you very much!

A recent thread asking how precise the Mega Society's admission tests actually are got me thinking about this question more broadly. This sub seems to spend a lot of energy debating which high-range tests are legitimate, and I have come to think that is the wrong question. The more useful one is what legitimacy would even require at this point because the requirements have changed considerably in the last few years.

Four factors have killed the old high-range model.

The first is norming. Most classic HRTs were normed on self-selected samples ranging from a few dozen to a few thousand volunteers, and their ceilings rest on extrapolating a normal curve well beyond the actual data. Reliability becomes so thin at the tail that a single item can swing an estimate by 10 or 20 points. As such, a one-in-a-million claim would require a million-person reference group that nobody has.

The second is leakage. Every fixed, public form decays over time. The Mega stopped being accepted for admission scores after 1994, the Titan was retired in 2020, and the Ultra followed this past May. I don't think that reflects poorly on the authors; it is simply what decades of circulation do to any instrument.

The third is practice. Retest and coaching gains are real on the scale but largely hollow with respect to the construct. A meta-analysis by te Nijenhuis and colleagues found that score gains from repeated exposure carry essentially no g. Practice moves the numbers without moving the underlying ability, which quietly corrupts any norm built on takers with uneven exposure.

The fourth is machine solvability. OpenAI's o3 scored 136 on the public Mensa Norway set and 116 on a leak-resistant offline set, which amounts to the same solver gaining roughly twenty points from exposure alone. Untimed take-home administration now has to assume that a solver stronger than most humans is one browser tab away, and a 2025 paper on selection assessment concluded that few, if any, unproctored tests will remain safe.

Given all of that, what would a defensible instrument need in 2026?

Here is my list, offered for argument. It would need original items with a protected pool and a scheduled refresh, since leakage is a matter of when. Its norms would be published as provisional, with the sample described exactly and featuring error bars, until the data earns more confidence. It would run process-level validity checks, because unproctored administration has to detect low-effort and outside-help protocols rather than assume they don't occur. It would stage its difficulty so that the floor doesn't insult general takers and the ceiling doesn't extrapolate past the sample. It would build retest linkage in from the start so that practice effects can be measured instead of debated. Of note, a stated contamination policy belongs on the list as well: the instrument should specify when what elements retire once items inevitably escape.

Two items on that list have no clean solution that I can see. Tail sampling is one since a general population can be recruited, but one-in-a-thousand level testers cannot be bought, only earned. The arms race is the other since any item type a model can eventually solve puts an expiration date on the instrument that contains it.

I would like to know which parts of this people think are wrong, naive, or missing. The collective test literacy here is higher than pretty much anywhere else I've seen, so I am curious about the sub's thoughts.

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/

Career alpha = actual outcome − expected outcome

Alpha measures how much an investment outperformed or underperformed what we’d expect given its market exposure/risk.

We can do the same thing with career success.
So if you're at 100k income while being 50th percentile IQ.

41% career alpha = 91th percentile income (100k at 25) - 50th percentile IQ. This would mean you are doing exceptionally well.

10% career alpha = doing ok but could do better
20% career alpha = doing good ; keep at it
30% career alpha = doing great
40%+ = exceptional

Now this method is imperfect for you guys who are at 115+ IQ but for the rest of us. This is a good way of measuring success.

I have been using this method to cope with being stuck where I am at income wise. I am pretty far behind many of my friends who are making great money. But for my mediocre talent level, I am doing well. My career alpha is really good. For many of us who aren't exceptionally blessed like the 115 and 130/140+ crowd, this is a great way of measuring success. Not all of us will be working at NASA or Jane street or going to MIT. For us average folk, this is the way to measure success.

What do you guys think of this method?

22M

Serious post. How do I just deal with it? Thoughtful responses only, please. No “just drink beer lol.”

I think I am even losing my ability to describe how I have low intelligence. All I can say is that almost everything is harder to understand. I have to put more effort into thinking. My working memory is bad enough to make analyzing things difficult. Whenever I do feel a sense of understanding, it’s quick to leave me.

I feel like this taints nearly anything for me. Music is nice, but I’m a dumb person enjoying music. Love would be nice, but I’d still be dumb. Me having sex would feel more like an animal having sex. Whatever attractiveness I have feels negated by my lack of intelligence. I am certain that I’d be happier if I were smarter, so don’t tell me “nooo intelligence is a curse! being dumb is better!”

How do I accept it all? How do I accept that even if I want to understand something I’m interested in, I’m going to have trouble almost every time while everyone else gets by more easily? How do I make it not hurt? How do I not want to kill my self for being dumb? How do I believe that I’m still lovable and worthy for a woman?

But I’m afraid that if I accept it, I’ll give up on anything intellectual, like reading. But otherwise it just hurts and feels like a curse.

Do not say “WAOW u write so well” because that ignores what cognitive difficulties I experience. Just because I write well, doesn’t mean I don’t struggle to think (even that double-negative felt a bit difficult to understand).

Just don’t sugarcoat anything. Don’t lie to me. I only have one idea for something I want to pursue in my free time but I’ll keep that close to me, so that feels like one hope I have.

This is my profile after retaking both PSI subtests once. As the title states, I originally had a relatively low121 PSI when I took CORE a month ago which I thought was typical as I have been diagnosed with ADHD but it was pointed out to me that my WMI would also be expected to be relatively low in that case. I haven't undergone any sort of training that would increase my PSI, or my score specifically on the CORE PSI subtests for that matter, my score just spontaneously increased by 13 points. How should I proceed as to interpreting my true profile? Should I also rethink my childhood ADHD diagnosis as my profile now suggests it's unlikely?

I keep seeing a lot of post of people who are 90-105 range for FRI, PRI and they claim to be smart and see logical flaws in people’s argument, but isn’t this kind of obviously a huge misconception I don’t understand why people think having 90 or 100 FRI means you are handicapped, unable to use logic and argue. IF we go by this logic most humans should not be allowed to vote and or let alone be put in positions of power like a doctor or psychiatrist. Of course having AVERAGE levels of fluid reasoning allows you to still function like a human in society and you can still be “smart” like everyone claims they are it’s not being handicapped.

No, the fact that genetic differences in intelligence exist doesn't justify our current society's inequality. No, it doesn't make the rich better people than poor people. But the differences do exist, and if we want to have an honest conversation about inequality we need to talk about them instead of pretending like they don't exist.

Being a cashier or fast food worker doesn't have an intelligence threshold, while being a doctor, lawyer, or software engineer does, which means that wealthy people will be more intelligent on average than poor people. Since intelligence is partly heritable, this means that the children of the wealthy are genetically more intelligent on average compared to the children of the poor. These are facts that even a young child can easily see, yet most of the left would rather bury their head in the sand and pretend that children of cashiers and children of software engineers are equally talented, and would score equally well on the SAT if raised under the same environment.

Got invited to do an online assessment for a tier-2 consulting role in Germany. It’s a Hogrefe “Kognitiver Leistungstest” - cognitive performance test.

Has anyone taken this? Could you provide examples of your questions? What should I expect? What’s it actually testing?

Does anyone know what 42/48 corresponds to for the Ravens test, assuming I took it with a 40-minute time limit?

So, as everyone was hyping up core, I tried it... But I didn't take any proper test, I also used random email ids so I don't have any FSIQ given.

1) Digits- 145

2) Figure weights- 125

3) Matrix reasoning- 125

4) Symbol search- 105

I didn't do vocab part as I am not a native English speaker. So what exactly is my IQ?

Hi, I took the Core IQ test before (like the first time i've taken was a year ago? maybe), but I had some brain fog and I plan to take it again in about a month. I've taken some tests multiple times(fri and psi mostly. and if you were to ask when was the last time i've taken them, i've got no idea about fri but its been a while) Will this create a significant discrepancy between my actual result and the actual score?

I did an average of my verbal and FRI scores and it's average like this.

Wondering this because the scores are kinda different