I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed…
But this is no ordinary shed! 
I’m so much smarter and cleverer than my station in life would indicate as to be ridiculous. I’m lacking ambition, but am fairly happy in my mundane life.
George
Smart enough so that everyone in my office comes to me with any question they may have (mostly spelling questions, but every now and then I get something like “Why do they call it Scotland Yard when it’s in England?”).
But dumb enough that I don’t bother to get a better job. 
I’m with George. I should have a great deal more ambition, drive, and salary. But I’m happy with my life. And it’s good for my self-esteem to be the smartest in the room at all times. 
Smart enough to respectfully decline to answer that question.
I’m quite smart. I’ve never taken a real IQ test (although a ten minute online test scored me at 158), but in middle school the OASIS aptitude tests rated me in the 99th percentile in several fields.
I have never met anyone who I know is smarter than me. This summer I took a speech class from a man who I think may be smarter than me, but he’s about three times my age and reads the OED for fun. He is certainly more educated than I, and has a great deal of expertise in his field. Nontheless, I maintain that I could surpass his current level of expertise before I reach his current age.
For those of us who aren’t posting because we’ve never taken an IQ test (or weren’t told our scores), try estimating it from this site if you took the SAT prior to January 31, 1994 or the GRE.
Note: I make no claims whatsoever for the accuracy of that site. For entertainment purposes only.
Oh, and can someone who knows more about IQ tests than I do explain what the difference between a 15- and a 16-sigma test is?
My numbers, from that site (16 sigma, just 'cos those are higher ;)):
IQ from SAT score: 145.46
IQ from GRE score: 154.30
I don’t believe those numbers, though. I don’t feel anywhere near that smart. I’m pretty sure Mr. Neville is smarter than me, and I always felt like almost everybody in my physics classes in college was smarter than me. I think I’ve gotten dumber since college, too 
I hang in GD anyway! What are they going to do about it? Stupidity, as far as I know, is not a banning offense, even in GD.
I mostly use what powers I have for that purpose as well. I can’t think of a nobler one…
Same here.
When I was a little bitty gay boy in Weokahatchee, Alabama, not more than knee high to a Frost Giant, my daddy took me to get me tested to see if I could enter school early. I still remember the test. The guy had blocks that were red on some side and white on others. They were in a pyramid.
[BALD GUY IN SUIT] Can you take these blocks and arrange them like this?
[Me] Yes.
[pause]
[crickets]
[conure cawing]
[BALD GUY IN SUIT] Well… are you going to?
[Me] Oh… okay… sure…
So (still remember this) I arranged them like he had them: four on the bottom, three on those, two on those, one on top.
Now he never once said to arrange the colors the same way (alternating red white or whatever), he just said to arrange the blocks like that.
I scored about in the 80s on the test, low average. My father, whose older children had skipped grades in school and straight A students, was convinced I was too slow to learn and tried to enroll me in a “special” class, but… For the rest of his life (he died when I was 15), he regarded me as retarded (which I can tell you rhymes- regarded/retarded- cause I can learn sometimes.)
Years later, after failing out of two high schools and graduating by the skin of teeth and the grace of a science teacher, I scored- well, I’ll be modest and say “substantially higher”. I’ve since had several testesses and always done extremely well, but I don’t consider myself particularly intelligent except as compared to a lot of other people
Short version: I think IQ tests are fun but I don’t put much stock in them. I’ve had a variable of literally scores of points and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
My favorite IQ test: a good friend was buying her Massa’s degree in Psychology and had to give X number each of several tests (I use “x” cause it’s math talk for unknown quantity and being good at being smart and stuff I know that). I agreed to take, at different times, one each of about three tests. The third time she got an emergency phone call halfway through the test and had to leave and she kept calling me to come finish it, but our schedules never did mesh. Finally when I had some days off and called her to arrange to come over she told me “Oh, I had to turn in the assignment already so I just answered the questions for you based on how you did on the others and how I think you’d have answered.” Then she told me, with complete sincerity (not joking at all, “You did really really well on it!”
Smarter than I look. (I’d almost HAVE to be.)
Smart enough to know that there are millions of people smarter than me. Smart enough not to have to pee on the electric fence for myself. Smart enough to talk someone else into doing it so I could watch. (Hey, I was 12, okay?)
IQ 159 by WISC-R at age 12. No specific IQ testing since. Myers-Briggs INTP. Academic underachiever, but I still have flashes of brilliance when working on something that interests me.
I’ve never really considered myself to be smart, so if I am smart, that would explain why I think so many people are stupid.
I think that smarts is probably more a function of practice than anything else. People think I’m smart when they see the books I read, but I didn’t start out reading heavy books, I just liked books that made me think. People think I’m smart because I can apply DeMorgan’s law to our zoning ordinance, but that’s just an artifact of reading challenging books.
IMO, smarts is not a function of how fast the machinery works, but how well the gears are adjusted. A person who takes fifteen minutes to work through the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine is much smarter than the mechanical genius who’s prototype machine fooled him into believing it was possible.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m going to quote you on that. I’m not very good at all at thinking on my feet, but I still like to think that I am smart.
I felt a lot smarter before I started hanging around here!
I’ve never been IQ tested. Sometimes I feel like the smartest person in the room, other times, I’m amazed that the brainy people I’m surrounded with put up with my dumb ass. And I think both of those feelings have some validity.
Large vocabulary, good memory for weird, wonderful and wacky facts.
Sheepskin from a good uni, plus a good job at a major corporation.
…My shining achievement is that I don’t have to remember how to tie my shoes because I wear flipflops. “The rabbit comes out, goes around, and goes back in…”
Besides, I regularly feel dumber than a box of rocks next to the people that I work with. Or hanging out here on the SDMB.
Smart enough to be accepted for a degree at Oxford. Dumb enough to misuse the opportunity and not actually study. Smart enough to still get a good, challenging career after stuffing up my degree - and hey, university’s not just about studying, I learned a lot.
Never taken an IQ test per se - when I lived in the states I was in the school’s Extended Education Programme, which apparently required a score above 120. I was a year younger than the rest of the kids in my class, too. On the two SAT tests I took over there (Grades 2 and 3 I think, not a great indication of IQ) I scored 41/41 and 41/42.
I’m considered smart by friends and colleagues, and even by my girlfriend
Blimey, I sound like I’m bragging. I’m not. I’m smart, but not uber-smart. I wish I were smarter.
Smart enough to really distrust measures of intelligence. I took the Wechsler II test under real conditions during college, when I was being tested for a learning disability. (This is the one that includes playing with blocks and various other visual/auditory stuff, in addition to knowing who write “Faust.”)
The reported scale ends at 150, but there’s apparently a guide for estimating above that. Based on that guide, I was given a score almost five standard deviations above the mean (around 170).
Should you be worshipping at my feet? Should I be asking Cecil for a job?
Uh, maybe not. First, IQ tests are well known to be unreliable above about 140, so any number you get that high needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Second, the “guide for estimating” sounds a bit off-the-cuff for me, too.
Third, there’s the whole “who wrote Faust?” stuff, which was covered in another thread - that’s a clear cultural and educationally biased question: exactly what these tests are supposed to avoid (they also ask what instrument Louie Armstrong played, I think).
But mostly it’s the BQ (believability quotient) of that number. Now, I like to think I’m pretty smart. One person in a hundred smart? Sure: remember that politicians are included in the population. One in a thousand smart? I score in the high 90s, often 99th percentile in a number of different areas, so sure, that’s borderline plausible. (One in 1000 smart probably only puts one at the 20% percentile here on the SDMB, though).
But five standard deviations is more than one in a thousand. It’s on the order of one in a million.
If I was really that smart, I’d be able to calculate it, rather than just looking up a few z-score tables on the web, realizing they only go to three, and making up a number that sounds right (knowing that z=6 gives you about 3.4 per billion, based on all the “six sigma” ads).
If I was that smart, I wouldn’t end up in a store twenty minutes from home, wondering what it was I drove there to buy. Even if IQ isn’t equivalent to memory, I’d have at least anticipated the problem and written a list.
If I was that smart, I wouldn’t argue with the pseudoscience advocates in GD, knowing it would frustrate me and not convince them. In fact, I would be better about evaluating the cost/benefit of an awful lot of my conversations, and either shortening them or eliminating them.
If I was that smart, I’d be rich, wouldn’t I? Or at least ruling a good fraction of the world from my secret base inside some volcano?
Seriously, though, I’ve met people as smart or smarter than I am. Many of them. Some of them hang out here. Far too many for me to be a one-in-a-million intellectual prodigy.
So I offer my original hypothesis: I’m smart enough not to believe the tests. When you have an awful lot of evidence telling you one thing, and a single data point in the other direction, it’s only rational to suspect the outlier. Alternative hypotheses: I’m good at taking tests. I got a few questions right by “lucky guesses.” The test giver made a mistake. The test just plain isn’t valid above some point.
How smart am I? I don’t know.
I’ve never been officially tested for IQ, and the online tests I tried gave results between 109 and 161, so I don’t put much credence in them.
I know people who are much smarter than me, based on their accomplishments while I’ve known them.
But IQ isn’t everything. There are all sorts of other things that can be summed up as ‘wisdom’, ‘emotional intelligence’, ‘social intelligence’, etc, which are also necessary to be a well-functioning human being in society. I would rate them more important than pure intelligence, actually. What use is being able to see 3D objects in your head if you don’t know how to, say, understand the body language that could tell you that somemone is trying to scam you?
And by those non-IQ criteria I have historically done far worse than by IQ. Fortunately, at least some of those are learnable, so I’m getting better at existing in the social world.
I’ve never taken an official IQ test, but based on Anne Neville’s website and online tests, I have a 150 or so. My SAT and ACT scores were very good, despite me being so ‘blah’ about them, I almost didn’t take them and when I was in 8th grade, I scored as a college freshman in many subjects. I’m also street smart/adaptive intelligent, you can drop me in the middle of an unknown city (has happened before) and I’ll find my way back. I’m putting myself through college right now and finding it way too easy. (It should get harder when I go to grad school.)
But on the other hand, I can’t organize my thoughts in any manner than makes sense to other people in the written form. (see what I mean?) So on message boards and in essays I come across as a complete idiot. It is frustrating at times, I know what I want to say, but can’t figure out how to say it in a way that others will understand, or I use the wrong words. I don’t respond to most posts that I know the answer to because of this but if it really compells me, I just try anyway. It’s annoying, but it’s never hindered my scholastic abilities or employment, so I’ve learned to live with it. What’s strange is that I score very well in English on all the tests I’ve taken, I got a perfect when I took the entrance test for my latest college. I just can’t get my mind to do it on its own.
I believe that there are different types of intelligence and that my types work for me.
Get the **** out of my head!!!
…the voices inside it are very particular about their personal space…shhh!!! They can hear everything we say!
Not me. I’m not terribly likely to find my way back in a familiar city…
Mwahahahaha! (evil laugh, turning bitter at the end…)
I believe the same thing, and I am very thankful that I was born into a society that values verbal and analytical intelligence as highly as ours does. In a society that valued different types of intelligence above those, I’d probably be considered not too bright.
No idea what my IQ is, and it’s been so long since I took a standardized test, it’d be silly… BUT, according to my last neurologist, I do have the EEG of an imbecile. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
-Lil