Man... I would love to administer the Stanford Binet test to a lot of people in this thread. All I'm saying.

Hehe.  I bet that the ex-cop would score a lot higher than some of them.

That'd be my guess yeah.  People tend to oversetimate their IQs, espiecally in the age of the internet IQ test.

LOL at folks thinking an IQ of 125 is smart.

It is (depending how old you are)

The point of the IQ test is that the average should always stay at 100, so an IQ of 100 should mean you are in the middle of the population. The standard deviation is also set so that a graph of the test participants forms a normal distribution. In other words between 65 and 70% of participants will have an IQ score between 85 and 115, and 95% will have an IQ score between 70 and 130.

It doesn't quite work like that for total population because improving education among other things means that generation by generation people are becoming smarter, I think it works out to something like 3 IQ point increase for every 10 years.

I'm not sure what age they take official IQ tests, I think it's somewhere between 5 and 10 years old, or maybe there are multiple tests through childhood i'm not sure (I wasn't told about mine... are Americans told what their IQ score is?). If I assume you took the test at 10 y.o. and that you are now 20 y.o. your score back then may have been 125, but if you took a test today the same performance would have got you a 122. (If you took it today as a 20 y.o. though, well hopefully you would have a better performance but you'd be competing against 10 year olds and have had more life experience so it's cheating)

In other words, an IQ of 125 taken today by a 10 year old is very smart (smarter than over 95% of other 10 year olds)
an IQ of 125 taken 30 years ago by a 10 year old would be more equivalent to a 116 today, though that should still be in the top 15%.

If you take an IQ test when you are older then it should only be compared to others of similar age, and it is doesn't represent what your official IQ score is which was taken when you were younger. (once again I ask, are some people told what their childhood IQ score was?)

Tests I have taken online seem to vary massively, and also seem over inflated (I think the lowest online score I got was 121, and I think over 150 in one of them) I think it may be that in some cases online tests are actually following the same rules as more official tests, in that they set the average to 100, but people don't take casual online tests seriously so lots of people probably get low scores due to being bored or maybe even quitting half way through... which brings the average down, and therefore inflates the scores of those who make an effort.

There was a show they did 2-3 years running here in the UK, I think it was called test the nation... and they did a kind of IQ test that viewers could follow along to, you could then work out your IQ and they gave a modifier to adjust depending on your age (so that it can be compared across age gaps better) whether it was reliable or not I don't know, but I think my adjusted scores worked out to 112 in one of them and 118 in another (my original scores being something like 121 and 128 respectively)
That to me has seemed like the most reliable IQ score that I have taken (and also know my score afterwards)

TWRoO - I understand all of that. My point was more that ranking in the top 5% isn't smart. Top 1% is getting closer, but for me to consider someone smart they would have to be in the top 0.1%.

It was more of comment on the definition of "smart" than anything.

How did his C.O. experience not factor into their final decision? He might've made a great cop if given the chance (or not, who knows). I always entertained the idea of being a detective, but I'd be screwed just like this guy if I was only judged by that test.

Ah ok, well to me at least smart and clever are relatively lowly terms. The top 0.1% of people I would probably describe as genius, and in IQ terms would probably be 160 or above.

I used to be too intelligent to be a cop. Then I took an arrow to the brain. I'm qualified now!