Reported

What is Marilyn vos Savant's IQ?

Marilyn vos Savant's reported IQ is 228 — the figure that put her in the Guinness Book of World Records. It came from a real test, but it is a ratio IQ from childhood, which is a different measurement from the deviation IQ every modern test reports. The two numbers do not mean the same thing.

228reported figure

Written and reviewed by the myfreeiqtest editors.

Marilyn vos Savant photographed from the shoulders up, facing the camera.

Marilyn vos SavantColumnist, former Guinness record holder

A quick, honest note. Marilyn vos Savant has a figure attributed to a named source, but it does not come from a controlled, modern test. Treat it as a report, not a measurement.

Where does the 228 number come from?

This is the most instructive number in the collection, because it is simultaneously real and misleading.

ClaimWhere it traces toHow solid

IQ 228Stanford-Binet taken at age ten; listed by Guinness 1986–1989Indirect

Highest recorded IQGuinness Book of World Records; category retired in 1990Indirect

Table 1 · Every thread behind the figure, and how much weight it can carry.

Old tests for children calculated IQ as a ratio: mental age divided by chronological age, times 100. A ten-year-old performing like a twenty-two-year-old scores 220. That arithmetic produces enormous numbers for precocious children and it does not survive into adulthood, because mental age stops climbing while chronological age does not.

Every modern test uses a deviation IQ instead: your score is placed against how people your own age actually perform, on a scale fixed at mean 100, standard deviation 15. On that scale 228 is not merely rare, it is roughly one in a number with more zeros than there have been humans. Nobody has an IQ of 228 in the modern sense, because the scale does not extend there.

Guinness retired the highest-IQ category in 1990, in part because figures like this could not be compared across tests. Vos Savant genuinely tested as an extraordinarily capable child. The specific number is an artefact of a method nobody uses any more.

How rare would a 228 IQ be?

If the 228 figure were literally true, it would be extraordinarily rare — rarer than1 in ∞ people. That alone is a good reason to treat any confident-sounding celebrity IQ number with a raised eyebrow.

Figure 1 · 228 on the standard curve.

1 in ∞

Too rare to draw — a grid with one highlighted dot in ∞ would be a solid wall of gray.

Figure 2 · A 228 would make Savant 1-in-∞ smart.

What a score like this would mean

A 228 would sit in the very superior · gifted range — about one person in ∞. Fill a large concert hall and you would expect nobody in the room to clear it.

See what that band actually means:What the top band means The full IQ scale

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