Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What does IQ score really get you?

IQ score becomes a barometer for so many opportunities but what does it really get you? More importantly what is the IQ score that translates to a defined success in the eyes of people in these coveted programs? What other variables outweigh these IQ scores but never get considered resulting in a child being rejected from a gifted program?

Let's take the Davidson program for example. The bar is set at 145. I see a lot of people post and their kids are just missing it. Mine certainly did according to the score. Is the bar wrong? Why 145 and not 135 or 115?

My son will start GA Tech this summer as a Junior at age 14. He is a white male with no hooks to this elite school and got a 1450 SAT with no preparation/study courses.
He took the WISC-V around age 7 and scored a 124. Nothing ground shattering but he is clearly smart. This is not considered highly gifted at least according to programs like Davidson but I struggle to see kids achieving more at such a young age than my son has. I would love to make sense of this because I have three other kids behind him.

A bit more on my son. He was at grade level till grade 5 (because the public school told us he was smart but not that smart...just an excuse) and we supplemented at home in math allowing him to accelerate at his pace. He read sometimes 2-3 books a day on the weekends between sporting events. He then went to a gifted private school for 6th where they immediately grade skipped, course accelerated, doubled the normal number of courses until he found a hint of challenge, etc. He still got all A's. This resulted in completing 6-12th grades + 2 years of college (dual enrollment) in 4 years. He was overdue and very bored up until this point. He is very driven, self sufficient and a very normal 14 year old boy. He plays at a high level travel ice hockey with age related peers so that he doesn't miss his teenage years completely by attending college early.

I am not up on any of the data but hoping this group can shed some light. Why would my son be excluded from a program like Davidson and yet achieve these kind of results? What type of IQ score correlates to a child requiring more acceleration like my son experienced despite a modestly high IQ score? Is my son an outlier in what he accomplished given a 124 IQ score or is this common? What does a score of 145 translate to in the real world or not?

These are excellent questions. A few pieces of perspective, first:

1. formal test scores are not really considered fully stable until about age 8 or 9, due to the highly variable testability of young children, as well as the wide range of healthy development possible. So the scores at age 7 could have been low estimates, for many unexceptionable reasons.
2. formal testing captures only certain aspects of development relevant to school and life success. 120+ is generally considered to be the range where factors other than pure cognitive ability become more significant in affecting an individual's outcomes. Among those factors that have been discussed in the research literature are: "grit" (determination, resilience to failure), executive function (organization, planning, follow-through, etc.), emotional intelligence.

To your question of what 145 means that 125 does not: There really is a significant difference in rate of learning between individuals legitimately at those respective levels. This does not necessarily translate into a difference in real life function, in either direction. As with any other inborn gift or trait, much lies in how it is developed, the opportunities encountered through the vagaries of life, and what the individual's other traits are.

To your question of why your son should be excluded: any program that has entrance criteria will unavoidably have to have applicants fall on either side of the line. At some point, doing away with entrance criteria would also do away with the ability to be significantly beneficial to any of the applicants at all. (Note: I have no children in DYS, nor have I had any particular urge to apply on their behalf. We have not even had them cognitively tested (though as a professional, I have a fairly good idea of where they would score). This has not prevented them from accessing the education we believe to be most appropriate to each of them.)

I should also point out that, clearly, access to DYS has not impaired your child's educational success in any noticeable way. And FWIW, I have known people with obtained scores very close to your son's who were able to enter college comparably early.

The truth as I see it?

A high IQ on its own gets you nothing.

Sure you can see patterns and relationships that are not quite as obvious to the bulk of the human population - so what?

Certainly they are tasks and careers that have a certain cognitive ‘floor’ but I do not see this any differently that a professional batsman needing naturally superlative hand eye coordination and high proportion of quick firing motor neurons to even have a chance at being successful.

Combining a high IQ with hard work, resilience and passion produces a multi dimensional product: achievement. It is achievement that gets you places.

Congratulations to you son on his achievements so far!

Kudos to the OP for finding such a great educational program for your son. And also for keeping him well grounded in his ability to spend time with typical age mates. Well done!

I just want to piggyback on your question - 2e kids often can't have their IQ measured. With 3-4 standard deviations in subscores my DD can't even get an accurate GAI to substitute. And her high score is generally assumed to be significantly underestimated so we can't necessarily use that either. We had an occasion one time where her IQ had to be submitted to qualify for a particular evaluation and the false number generated in her testing just barely met the requirement (used to filter out kids with such low cognitive abilities they would lack the necessary ability to follow basic instructions...). Some of her comprehension scores placed her above graduate school level as a newly turned 10 year old but she barely made the cutoff for too intellectually disabled to follow basic instructions...

Is there actually a NEED for an IQ score? If so in what context? And how do you accomplish that when you have a kid with LD and processing issues that stump the standard tests? We too have been fortunate to be able to put together a program that works really, really well but have basically accepted that any program or institute that relies on standard test scores will not work for her. It's probably great for kids who can be tested in a straightforward way but I have yet to find any kind of a box my child will fit into...

You've asked great questions and received great replies above.


What does IQ score really get you?
IQ score gets a bit of self-knowledge. It provides a snapshot measure of intelligence... and in this context, sometimes "less is more," which is to say that the optimal IQ is NOT the highest IQ, but is generally considered to be about 120-125. There are many references to this found online, this old post includes one.

What is the IQ score that translates to a defined success in the eyes of people in these coveted programs?
An IQ score is not one's success index. It is indicative of fluid reasoning + crystallized intelligence.

The DYS program may be coveted because children and families need the services being offered/provided. Therefore it is not a "success," achievement, or accomplishment to be admitted into the program, but rather a "relief" for a child/family to have potential to be among other outlier peers who may tend to encounter similar life experiences (including inadequate educational placement, and societal myths and misconceptions about being gifted or high-IQ).

Davidson... Why 145 and not 135 or 115?
It is my understanding that the aim of the Davidsons was to identify and assist the under-served population of profoundly gifted students. Is my son an outlier in what he accomplished given a 124 IQ score or is this common?
As mentioned above, 120-125 may be considered the optimal IQ. (This research mentions 125-155, measured on an older IQ test score scale... more info on comparative IQ scores from various tests, here.)
According to this chart, an IQ score of 124 may be found once in about 18 persons.
A teacher with a class size of 25 pupils may encounter such a student once each year.
By comparison, an IQ score of 145 may be found about once in 741 persons.
A teacher with a class size of 25 pupils may encounter such a student once in 30 years; just once in his/her career.

Links to information on IQ score, which may be of interest:
- Hoagies Gifted Education Page - Moderately - Highly - Exceptionally - Profoundly
- Hoagies Gifted Education Page - Underserved

What does a score of 145 translate to in the real world...?
In terms of rarity - IQ score comparison site
In terms of characteristics of profoundly gifted - list, Davidson article
In terms of likely need for support - SENG, founded to meet a need
In terms of likely need for educational advocacy - oobleck
In terms of achievement, success - ???

This has outsized benefits in entrepreneurial contexts and academic research, and is the foundation on which anything more than incremental development occurs. Disruptors are, by definition, curious pattern chasers.

But I take your point well that the other ingredients make this a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for amounting to anything.

IQ tests are just a snapshot of the brain at a given time. OP, it is quite possible that your son did not test well on the WISC on that particular day and that he is very gifted in spite of the level of his IQ score.
as to what an IQ score gets you: in our case, there was no tangible "reward" from having a score - except that I, as a parent know that there is latent ability in the child and there is a pressing need for differentiation and opportunities. I, as a parent, try to do the best that I can with regards to finding those opportunities. Our local school system does not provide gifted programming because of various disputes and lawsuits by parents, so the IQ numbers are not useful in that setting. But, they provided a good basis to advocate in a private school setting.

I would add - working with our school boards and with parents, I tend to emphasize that IQ is a purely statistical construct. By its very definition, all it does is tell you how far you are from the norm. That's it. How far from "normal". Not how better. IQ measures how *differently* a child's brain works from the brains of the other children around them.

And I continually find that the more differently a child's brain is wired in this one measurable way, the more likely they seem to be wired differently in a variety of other ways too.

Having a sense of scale about how much different your child is can be very helpful as a parent. All kids generally have the same basic needs: family love, social connection, academic engagement. But the pathways to provide those can be really different for some kids: what works fine for their schoolmates can be unhelpful, even destructive, for them. PG kids often do poorly in school: they are simply functioning too differently for the way school works. They are often not the kids with great marks, who are the best - the "smartest" at doing stuff the school way. Teachers tend to find PG kids really frustrating. They are not doing the same thing, faster; they're doing something else, some way else, entirely beyond the teacher's imagining.

The numbers are just a hint, not fate. So I have found that IQ doesn't tell me much, but it is a warning to me about just how creative I may have to get, how far out of the box my child might need me to go, how differently I may have to be from the other moms in order to meet his needs, how differently we may need to think of his schooling to keep him from flunking out.

For us, the IQ score enabled our son to attend a charter school that only admits kids with an IQ above X. The school itself did not add that much to his knowledge. He had some bad teachers and some v good teachers like every other school. The biggest benefit was he was surrounded by a great group of interesting kids for three years.

He is interested in STEM and history and as he never really learned a lot in school we supplemented his learning with AoPS and other online resources. He also enjoys academic competitions, primarily due to the kids that are typically involved. I do not think we did things any differently based on his IQ. We simply always tried to keep him interested and challenged.

His IQ was tested at 145 but he has performed much better than some that probably have higher IQs given his work ethic and level of interest. There are also some of his friends that regularly beat him in some of the math competitions, typically they have parents that are very highly educated in math. Math competitions are a great way to keep him grounded.