What's a good score on the Wonderlic?

In the 30s is pretty good, but it can't come close to measuring intelligence. All it's good for is weeding out the complete morons. I used to work in HR for a summer job, and I administered 1000s of those industrial aptitude tests.

They are also used for trade schools and other non-collegiate educational programs, to see if the applicant knows the answer to questions ranging from extremely basic to ordinary high school competency, and a few questions beyond. Anything below 10 is pretty weak. The applicant may not be able to read a how-to manual for his/her job.

I know only one person has tested a perfect score in the NFL and he went to Harvard. 20 I know is average, so anything under 20 I think is bad.

A quick search with Google said that you can *roughly* estimate your IQ by doubling the Wonderlic score and adding 60. Hence 20 corresponds to 100 (average) IQ.

OTOH:

"Eli Manning scored a 39, putting him in the 99th percentile of last year's two and a half million Wonderlic test takers."

Double that 39 and add 60, and you get 138--which I think is *not* in the 99th %ile for IQ.

So who knows.

I dunno, Alex Smith got a perfect score on it

while Vince Young got a hilarous score on it.

Both extremes seen to force failure in sports.

ummm wrote:

OTOH:

"Eli Manning scored a 39, putting him in the 99th percentile of last year's two and a half million Wonderlic test takers."

Double that 39 and add 60, and you get 138--which I think is *not* in the 99th %ile for IQ.

Yeah, the add 60 part of it isn't proportional, so that might be where the difference comes in. I would assume that the higher you go up the more you would need to add on (70,80, etc) and vice versa for lower scores.

i don't think Alex Smith got a perfect score. You might be thinking of Ryan Fizpatrick (Harvard), but he didn't get a 50either. I don't know if anyone (any NFL player, that it) has gotten a perfect score. The funniest thing is that the makers of the exam claim that a score of 10 demonstrates that one is literate, while the average score would be around a 24. Vince Young scored a 6. Amazing.

o.O wrote:

I dunno, Alex Smith got a perfect score on it

while Vince Young got a hilarous score on it.

Both extremes seen to force failure in sports.

ummm wrote:

A quick search with Google said that you can *roughly* estimate your IQ by doubling the Wonderlic score and adding 60. Hence 20 corresponds to 100 (average) IQ.

OTOH:

"Eli Manning scored a 39, putting him in the 99th percentile of last year's two and a half million Wonderlic test takers."

Double that 39 and add 60, and you get 138--which I think is *not* in the 99th %ile for IQ.

So who knows.

You are right. A 138 implies a 99.43 percentile (assuming a normal distribution with mean = 100, SD = 15, the distribution that the IQ test supposedly produces). In my eyes 99.43 is pretty close to 99, but I guess I'm not very precise.

I once worked for a company that decided to administer the Wonderlic test to all of its 50,000 salaried employees. After scoring only 44 of 50, I got a letter from the company saying that it had administered the test to IBM, AT&T, Procter & Gamble and many other Fortune 100 firms, and nobody beat or equaled that score. wonderlic also included a 100-page treatise on the test, its methodology, and a variety of statistical results. I was especially surprised to see a series of comments on the racial divide, including the statement that black college graduates score about like white high school graduates. I cannot answer the 25%/75% quartile question, but I did read that there is no simplistic way to convert Wonderlic to IQ. Intuitively it seems that the higher the Wonderlic score, the greater the "additive" (the number 60) would need to be for IQ equivalence. Postscript: once my score was revealed to senior management, I got three promotions in two years. [quote]wonderlic er wrote:

Unholy Cumulus wrote:

You are right. A 138 implies a 99.43 percentile (assuming a normal distribution with mean = 100, SD = 15, the distribution that the IQ test supposedly produces). In my eyes 99.43 is pretty close to 99, but I guess I'm not very precise.

I stand corrected. Your statement is verified here:

I hadn't realized that my own score was so special. Thanks for pointing it out!

[Of course, nitpickers may want to point out that IQ is not a true normal distribution, but it's close enough...

[And the person who was interested in racial differences might find this interesting, though it's lengthy; still, Figs. 3-6 and their captions sum it up pretty well:

If Eli Manning's IQ is 138 on the WAIS (probably the most commonly used, with 15 point SDs... then his score was higher than 99.4350805958% of the population's would be.

That's well into the 99th percentile, as a note.

An IQ of 138 puts eli in the 99th percentile for IQ charts.

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx

So... My 46 that I did without taking it seriously is probably just about the letsrun average?

I really did score a 46 without taking it seriously, I strongly doubt that average is ONLY 24.... That's abysmal.

I thought 24 was awful too... I've taken it 3 times-- first I got a 38, then 43, then 45.

All potential hires at my employer must take the Wonderlic.

It has become less and less relevant as we've grown, because most applicants come in "knowing" that this is a requirement. Thus, they take numerous practice tests and/or pay to take the actual test. This reduces the useful considerably because the practice inflates the scores quite dramatically.

We set out to try to "prove" the "practice = inflation" hypothesis late last year, by having a very bright engineer study for and repeat the Wonderlic a total of five times.

His original score, some three years ago, was 37. His repeat scores, three years on, were 40, 42, 41, 44, and 44.

That's a marked improvement, to say the least.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I only scored a 39.

Ryan Fitz scored a 48 on it. Vince Young did score a 6 and his agent hastily arranged for him to take again and he scored like a 12. What the heck was he doing for 4 years at the University of Texas? It is not a hard test.

Debbbie Ddddd wrote:

Ryan Fitz scored a 48 on it. Vince Young did score a 6 and his agent hastily arranged for him to take again and he scored like a 12. What the heck was he doing for 4 years at the University of Texas? It is not a hard test.

I don't know anything about the questions but wouldn't randomly guessing on every question would yield a score higher than 6.

Here is a sample 10 Question exam -

http://wonderlictestsample.com/wonderlic-test-sample/10-question-wonderlic-test/

Not vince wrote:

Debbbie Ddddd wrote:

Ryan Fitz scored a 48 on it. Vince Young did score a 6 and his agent hastily arranged for him to take again and he scored like a 12. What the heck was he doing for 4 years at the University of Texas? It is not a hard test.

I don't know anything about the questions but wouldn't randomly guessing on every question would yield a score higher than 6.

Randomly guessing every score on the test could yield a score but it doesn't have to as your comment implies.