Topic summary
IQ score
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Intelligence quotient.
Reliability
Outside influences such as low motivation or high anxiety can occasionally lower a person's IQ test score. For individuals with very low scores, the 95% confidence interval may be greater than 40 points, potentially complicating the accuracy of diagnoses of intellectual disability. By the same token, high IQ scores are also significantly less reliable than those near to the population median. Reports of IQ scores much higher than 160 are considered dubious.