Sylvester Stallone's IQ: an Unsourced Number and a Record You Can Check

0 The Quick Answer on the Sylvester Stallone IQ Claim

No IQ score for Sylvester Stallone has ever been published by anyone who administered a test, and the figure of 160 that fills search results is unsupported: no version of it names an instrument, a date, an examiner or a norm table. ACIS has not assessed him, holds no session or score belonging to him, and cannot assess him or anyone else from a biography. Nothing on this page is an ACIS measurement of Sylvester Stallone, and no retrospective assessment of a living or dead person is possible with this or any other instrument.

The number appears on celebrity IQ aggregator pages, on entertainment listicles, and in social posts that recycle those listicles. Follow any of them upstream and the citation chain terminates in another page that also cites nothing. That is the whole provenance. It is worth saying plainly rather than hedging: the 160 is not a disputed measurement, it is not a contested measurement, and it is not an old measurement. There is no measurement.

What sits next to that void is unusually strong for a celebrity page. Stallone wrote the screenplay for Rocky in 1975, refused to sell it unless he played the lead, and was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for that film at the 1977 ceremony. Those facts are in the Academy's own public database and in the American Film Institute's catalog entry, sourced there to interviews published in November 1976. A documented body of written work is real evidence about a person's ability. It is not a test score, it cannot be converted into one, and the difference between those two statements is the argument of this page.

1 Where the 160 Comes From, and Where the Trail Stops

Tracing the number backwards is a short exercise, because every page that carries it points to another page that carries it. The figure appears on celebrity IQ aggregators, which exist to publish one integer per famous person and which almost never state a method. It appears on entertainment roundups of stars who are supposedly smarter than they look. It appears on social accounts that post trivia cards. None of those versions names a psychologist, a testing date, a testing location, a battery, or a score report, and none of them quotes Stallone giving a number.

That pattern is diagnostic rather than merely unsatisfying. A real administration produces an origin event: a person sat a test on a date, someone scored it against a reference sample, and someone reported the result. Even a heavily disputed real score leaves that trail, which is why arguments about historical figures can at least be conducted over documents. The 160 has no origin event to argue about, so there is nothing to weigh against it.

The most economical explanation is the ordinary one. Somebody writing a list needed a number for a man whose public image is physical and whose actual record is literary, picked a figure that sounded rare enough to make the contrast land, and every later page copied it. That is the default outcome in this genre and not an unlucky exception. The audit on the page that sorts famous IQ claims into four evidence classes places four of thirty five examined cases in the class with any cognitive administration on record at all, and exactly one of those four has a named instrument, a named date and a comparison group tested alongside him. Everything else is folklore with three digits.

One detail about the specific number is worth noticing. A composite of 160 on a scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 sits four standard deviations above the mean. That is a position where measurement itself becomes difficult, because tests carry few items that discriminate among people at that level and reference samples contain few people there to anchor the conversion. What a figure at that height would and would not support is worked through on the score page for 160, and the population frequency it implies is on the calculator that converts a score into a 1 in X rarity. Neither of those pages can rescue a number with no test behind it. They only show how much weight the number is being asked to carry.

Search interest in the phrase is real, which is why this page exists, but the honest answer to the query is a negative one. Nobody knows. Nobody has published a measurement. And the reason people keep asking is not curiosity about psychometrics, it is curiosity about a contradiction between an actor's screen persona and the work that persona was built on. That contradiction has an answer, and it is documented.

2 What the Record Documents: the Rocky Screenplay in 1975

The best documented cognitive act in Stallone's life is a piece of writing, and the contemporaneous sources for it are unusually specific. The American Film Institute Catalog entry for Rocky reconstructs the origin from interviews published while the film was in release. Citing a November 1976 New York Times interview with Stallone, it records that the 1975 championship fight between Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali gave him the idea, and that watching it he thought about stifled ambition and broken dreams. That fight took place on March 24, 1975, at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio, and Ali stopped Wepner in the fifteenth round after being put on the canvas himself in the ninth. The ACIS page on the fighter on the other side of that night covers the separate set of claims attached to Ali.

The same AFI entry, from the same November 1976 interview, records that Stallone wrote a rough first draft in three and a half days and then produced two further drafts. Note the shape of that claim. It is not that a finished shooting script appeared in three days. It is that a rough draft appeared very fast and was then revised twice, which is a description of a working method rather than a miracle.

The second documented act is the refusal. Citing a November 1976 Los Angeles Herald Examiner article, the AFI entry records that Stallone was offered up to 275,000 dollars for the script by United Artists and other companies, and that he would not sell unless he could play the lead. Producer Irwin Winkler, quoted in a November 1996 Los Angeles Times piece cited in the same entry, said the studio wanted Ryan O'Neal, James Caan or Burt Reynolds in the role. An April 2001 Variety item cited there adds Robert Redford to the list of names considered. To get their unknown, Winkler and Robert Chartoff invoked a contractual provision that let them make a film under 1,500,000 dollars, and produced Rocky for about 1,000,000 dollars.

Read the 1975 episode as a decision rather than as a legend. A man with almost no money turned down a sum that would have changed his circumstances immediately, in exchange for a contingent outcome he could not control, on the judgment that the script was worth more with him in it than without him. That is a bet made on an assessment of one's own work under uncertainty, and it happened to be correct. It is documented. It is also not a number, and the next sections say why that matters.

3 Two Nominations for One Film in One Year

The single hardest piece of evidence on this page comes from an institution that publishes its own records, which is why it can be checked in one click. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lists, for the 49th Academy Awards held on March 28, 1977, Sylvester Stallone as a nominee for Actor in a Leading Role for Rocky and as a nominee for Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for the same film. He won neither. Peter Finch won the acting award for Network, and Paddy Chayefsky won the writing award for the same film. Rocky itself won Best Picture, Directing for John G. Avildsen, and Film Editing.

The rarity of the double nomination is checkable against the same database rather than taken on trust. The 13th Academy Awards, held on February 27, 1941, list Charles Chaplin in both Actor in a Leading Role and Writing, Original Screenplay, for The Great Dictator. The 14th Academy Awards, held on February 26, 1942, list Orson Welles in both categories for Citizen Kane, where he won the writing award jointly with Herman J. Mankiewicz and lost the acting award to Gary Cooper. Stallone was the third.

There is a second Academy record worth stating because it is separated from the first by thirty nine years. The Academy lists Stallone as a nominee for Actor in a Supporting Role at the 88th ceremony on February 28, 2016, for Creed, playing the same character he had written in 1975. Mark Rylance won. Two acting nominations for one character, four decades apart, is a fact about persistence and craft, and it is the sort of thing that can be verified without anyone's cooperation.

None of that produces an IQ estimate, and the temptation to treat it as one should be named out loud. An Academy nomination is a vote by a professional membership about a piece of work in a given year. It reflects the work, the competition that year, the campaign around the film, and the composition of the branch that nominates. It is a strong signal about output. It is not an instrument with a reference sample, a standard error and a documented construct, which is what a score requires and what the page on reliability and validity sets out in full.

4 The Birth Injury, the Schools, and the Early Record

The early biography is the part of the record that most often gets used to argue a conclusion in either direction, and it supports neither. Stallone was born in New York City on July 6, 1946. Complications during delivery required forceps, and a nerve was severed in the process, leaving permanent paralysis in the lower left side of his face including parts of his lip, tongue and chin. That injury produced the fixed half snarl and the distinctive speech that would later be treated as a screen signature. This item is reported consistently across biographical coverage and has been described by Stallone himself in interviews, but no medical record has been inspected here, so treat it as reported rather than documented.

The childhood was unsettled. Reported accounts have him spending part of his infancy in foster and boarding care before rejoining his family, and moving between schools: Notre Dame Academy and Abraham Lincoln High School in the Philadelphia area, then Charlotte Hall Military Academy in Maryland. Anecdotes about disciplinary trouble and about a classroom prediction that he would come to a bad end circulate widely and are attributed rather than documented, which is the correct label for a story whose only source is a retelling.

Two things follow from this, and only two. First, a speech impairment caused by peripheral nerve damage says nothing whatever about cognitive ability, and any reading that treats slurred articulation as evidence of anything cognitive is simply an error about what a facial nerve does. Second, a chaotic school record is not evidence of low ability either. School performance is a joint product of ability, stability, attendance, health and instruction, which is why even the strongest measured relationship in this literature leaves most of the variance unexplained. Roth and colleagues reported in Intelligence in 2015, pooling 240 independent samples and 105,185 participants, a corrected correlation of .54 between intelligence and school grades. A correlation of that size accounts for under a third of the variance in grades, which means the majority of what separates two students' marks is something other than measured ability.

So the early record does what a real biography usually does. It rules out the lazy inference in both directions. It gives no support to a reader who wants to conclude that the man behind the diction must be unremarkable, and it gives no support to a reader who wants to conclude that early adversity plus later success implies an extraordinary score. Neither conclusion is available from these facts, and the group level evidence on the measured relationship between ability and academic achievement is exactly why.

5 Switzerland, Miami, and a Degree Awarded Decades Late

The formal education record is real, modest, and interesting mostly for how it ends. Reported accounts place Stallone at the American College of Switzerland from September 1965 to June 1967, where he studied and also worked to cover costs, and then at the University of Miami as a drama major from 1967 to 1969. He left without finishing, short of the credits required to graduate, and went to New York to act and to write.

Decades later the University of Miami accepted his professional and life experience in place of the outstanding credits and conferred the degree. The year is reported as 1998 in some accounts and 1999 in others, and no primary university record was located for this page, so both the award and its date sit in the reported column rather than the documented one. That inconsistency is a small and useful example: even a fact with an institution behind it drifts when it travels only through retellings, and the fix is always the same, which is to go and read what the institution itself published.

Compare this with the way an educational credential is normally used as a proxy. Admissions tests correlate strongly with general ability at the group level. Frey and Detterman reported in Psychological Science in 2004, volume 15, pages 373 to 378, a correlation of .82 between SAT scores and a general factor extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery in 917 participants, and .48 between the SAT and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices in 104 undergraduates, .72 after correction for restriction of range. Bridgeman replied in the same journal in 2005, volume 16, pages 745 to 746, arguing that individual IQ predictions built from that relationship were far more precise than the data could support.

None of that machinery is available here in any case, because no admissions test score of Stallone's is public, and a degree awarded for life experience carries no examination behind it by construction. The proxy route is closed. What remains is the work itself, which is the subject of the next three sections and the reason this page is worth reading at all. Readers interested in how far an educational credential can be pushed as a stand in for a score will find the general case on the page on average IQ by education level.

6 Five Decades of Writing and Directing Credits

The single screenplay is the famous fact, and the sustained output after it is the more informative one. A person can produce one good thing by luck. Producing a long stream of them under commercial deadlines, across changing formats and changing collaborators, is a different kind of evidence, because luck does not repeat on schedule.

Stallone has directed eight features: Paradise Alley in 1978, Rocky II in 1979, Rocky III in 1982, Staying Alive in 1983, Rocky IV in 1985, Rocky Balboa in 2006, Rambo in 2008 and The Expendables in 2010. His writing credits run from The Lords of Flatbush in 1974 to A Working Man in 2025, and include the six Rocky films, the Rambo series, F.I.S.T., Cobra, Over the Top, Cliffhanger, Driven, Homefront and Creed II. Counting sole and shared credits together, the total is above twenty features across five decades. That aggregate is reported from compiled filmographies rather than verified title by title against studio records here.

Sustained production of this kind matters to the argument for a specific reason. In the psychometric literature the strongest prospective evidence about high ability and later output runs from an early measured score to a later record of accomplishment. Kell, Lubinski and Benbow followed 320 people identified before age thirteen in the top one in ten thousand on mathematical or verbal reasoning, and reported in Psychological Science in 2013, volume 24, pages 648 to 659, that by age thirty eight the group had accumulated substantial creative accomplishments and prominent positions across several sectors. That study starts from a test and ends at a record. This page has the record and no test, which is the reverse of the design, and reversing a prediction is not the same operation as making one.

There is a further point about what the writing credits are and are not. A shared credit is a negotiated outcome under guild arbitration rules, not a measurement of contribution. Studio rewriting is normal. The honest reading of a filmography is that it establishes a long professional life spent producing structured written material under deadline, which is a fact about behavior, and that it does not apportion cognitive credit line by line.

7 Screenwriting Is a Verbal, Structural and Planning Task

Writing a feature screenplay is one of the more cognitively demanding things a person can do for a living, and the research literature on writing says so in terms that map onto measurable abilities. The task is verbal at the surface and structural underneath. A writer holds a plan, a growing text, and a model of how a reader will take the text, and keeps all three in play while producing sentences that satisfy all three at once.

Kellogg set that out formally in the Journal of Writing Research in 2008, volume 1, pages 1 to 26. His developmental model runs through three stages. Knowledge telling, characteristic of novices, is writing down what comes to mind. Knowledge transforming, characteristic of competent adult writers, reshapes content in the act of writing it. Knowledge crafting, the expert stage, is one in which representations of the author's planned content, the text itself, and the prospective reader's interpretation of that text are routinely manipulated in working memory. Kellogg's abstract states that writing skill typically develops over the course of more than two decades.

Line that model up against what an intelligence battery samples and the overlap is obvious rather than metaphorical. The verbal comprehension domain, Gc in the Cattell Horn Carroll framework, is measured through tasks like defining words and abstracting the relation between two concepts. In the ACIS technical model those subtests carry g loadings of .848 for Vocabulary and .865 for Similarities, and the Verbal Comprehension Index built from five such subtests has an omega reliability of .9745 and a g loading of .864. The working memory domain, Gwm, is measured through tasks that require holding and reordering material, and its index has an omega of .9247 with a standard error of measurement of 4.12 points. The domain by domain map is on the cognitive domains page, with individual task descriptions on the Vocabulary subtest page, the Similarities subtest page and the Digit Span subtest page.

One more thing follows from Kellogg's two decade figure. Expert writing is a trained capability, and training is exactly the sort of thing a crystallized ability measure is designed to reflect and a fluid reasoning measure is designed not to reflect. That distinction is the reason a profile carries information a single composite cannot, and it is laid out on the comparison of fluid and crystallized ability.

8 Why a Documented Body of Work Is Not a Score

Accomplishment and measurement are different quantities, and the reason they cannot substitute for one another is arithmetic rather than etiquette. A test score is a rank on a construct, obtained under standard conditions, against a defined reference sample, with a stated error term. An accomplishment is a single realized event produced by ability, opportunity, effort, timing, collaborators, health, and a market. Converting the second into the first requires knowing how much each of those contributed, and nobody knows that for any individual case.

The group level relationships are the useful check on how far the conversion could ever go. Strenze pooled the longitudinal literature in Intelligence in 2007, volume 35, pages 401 to 426, and reported correlations of about .56 between measured intelligence and educational attainment, .43 with occupational status, and .20 with income. Those are among the larger effects in psychology and they are still far from determinative. A correlation of .43 leaves roughly 82 percent of the variance in occupational status unexplained by measured ability. Read that in the direction this page needs it and the problem is stark: given an unusually high occupational outcome, the distribution of scores consistent with it is very wide.

Selection makes it worse rather than better. The films that get made and remembered are a filtered sample from a much larger population of scripts, and the filter runs on commercial judgment, timing and access as well as on quality. Conditioning on a rare success and then inferring backwards to the underlying trait is the classic error, and it is why the page tracing the 140 genius threshold to a single 1916 classification table ends where it does: inside groups already selected at the top, the remaining score differences explain very little of the remaining differences in what people achieve.

There is also a plain matter of construct. Even if a conversion were statistically possible, it would have to name what is being converted into what. The 160 names nothing. It does not say whether it is a Full Scale composite, a verbal index, a ratio score of the sort used before deviation scoring, or a figure from a self administered quiz with no norms. Numbers on the standard scale have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, and a figure quoted without that frame is not a score at all. The frame is explained on the page on the 15 point standard deviation and the resulting bands on the IQ score scale.

The correct position is therefore not skepticism about Stallone. It is precision about categories. The screenplay is evidence. The nominations are evidence. The five decade filmography is evidence. All of it supports statements about demonstrated capability in a specific domain over a long period. None of it supports a number, and a page that offered one would be doing exactly what the aggregators did, only with better footnotes. The point holds even at the top of the evidence ladder: the actor with two peer reviewed publications and a Harvard degree in psychology has the strongest documented record in the profession, and it produces no score either.

9 Two Rocky Actors, Two Kinds of Evidence, No Test Score

The clearest way to see what a documented record can and cannot do is to put two men from the same film side by side, because their records are strong in completely different ways and neither ends in a score. Stallone wrote and directed Rocky IV in 1985. The actor he cast as Ivan Drago was Dolph Lundgren, whose academic record is the best documented of any action star: chemical engineering study in Sweden, a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney completed in 1982, and a Fulbright scholarship to MIT in 1983 that he abandoned within weeks for the film that made him famous.

Lundgren's evidence is institutional. Enrollment records exist, a degree was conferred, a named scholarship program publishes its own history. Those are checkable facts produced by organizations with an interest in accuracy. Stallone's evidence is documentary in a different sense: a screenplay, a production history reconstructed from 1976 interviews, and a public awards database. Both piles are real. Neither pile contains an IQ score.

The interesting row is the last one. Lundgren has publicly declined to confirm the figure attached to him, which is about as clean a resolution as a celebrity IQ claim can get without a document. Stallone has not, as far as this page could establish, ever put a number to himself in public either. Two men, the same invented figure, two entirely different real records, and zero measurements between them.

That comparison also disposes of a tempting shortcut. If the graduate degree in chemical engineering does not license an IQ estimate, and it does not, then a screenplay certainly does not. The stronger credential does not clear the bar, so nothing weaker clears it either. What both cases actually demonstrate is that a person's documented record is usually more interesting than the invented number stuck to it, which is the finding the whole celebrity roundup keeps producing.

10 Every Claim on This Page, With Its Label

A page that grades other people's evidence owes the reader a grade on its own, so here is every substantive claim above with its source and its label. The labels used here are documented, meaning a primary source states it; reported, meaning a named outlet or compiled reference states it and the primary record has not been inspected; attributed, meaning someone is quoted asserting it; estimated, meaning derived by a stated method with stated assumptions; and unsupported, meaning no traceable source exists.

Notice which rows carry the strongest label. The Academy rows are documented because the Academy publishes its own nomination records and is describing its own decisions, which removes the chain of retelling that degrades most celebrity biography. The two Rocky production rows are labeled carefully: the AFI Catalog is a reliable secondary source citing named contemporaneous journalism, so what is documented is what those November 1976 pieces reported, not an independently verified fact about the writing process.

Notice also that no row is labeled estimated. That label is reserved for a figure produced by a stated method with stated assumptions, such as a documented proxy score converted using a published equation. Nothing here qualifies, because there is no proxy score to convert. The habit of labeling claims this way is the same discipline that keeps the catalogue of persistent IQ myths from becoming another list of repeated assertions.

11 What It Would Take to Support a 160

The claim is not unfalsifiable, it is just unsupported, and setting out what would actually establish it makes the gap concrete. Four things are needed, and they are the same four required for any score anyone reports about anyone.

• A named instrument. A current individually administered battery, identified by name and edition, so that the construct being measured is known. A figure with no instrument behind it does not specify what was measured.
• A date and an administration record. Scores are not permanent properties. Norms are re-standardized, and population performance drifts over decades, which is why the Flynn effect page matters to any old number. A score without a date cannot be placed against any reference sample.
• A qualified examiner and controlled conditions. Someone who administered the battery under standard conditions and verified the identity of the person taking it. This is the difference between a measurement and a claim, and it is covered on the page on who is qualified to administer an intelligence test.
• A reported error term. A composite reported without a confidence interval overstates its own precision. At four standard deviations above the mean, where a 160 sits, the interval is wider than in the middle of the range, because fewer items discriminate there and fewer people in the reference sample anchor the conversion.

Not one of those four exists for the 160. That is a complete failure rather than a partial one, and it is worth being explicit that the failure is not close. If even one element were present, a reader could argue about the rest. With none present there is nothing to argue about.

The same four requirements dispose of the related search for a Mensa connection. Society membership is a verifiable event with a published criterion behind it, usually a score at or above the 98th percentile on an approved supervised test, and no membership record for Stallone was located. Criteria and approved test lists are set out on the Mensa page and the high IQ society requirements page. Absence of a record is not proof of absence, but a claim of membership needs a record, and none is on offer.

12 Measuring Your Own Profile Instead of Guessing His

The question behind most celebrity IQ searches is answerable for the person asking it, which is the one useful thing to take from a page like this. You can obtain a score with a stated structure, a stated precision and stated limits, and that is more than any famous person's rumored figure offers. ACIS is a self-administered online assessment for adults aged 16 to 90, built from 20 subtests across the six Cattell Horn Carroll domains, with subtest scaled scores on a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3 and composites on a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

The published index figures give a sense of what a structured report contains. Verbal Comprehension has an omega reliability of .9745, a standard error of measurement of 2.40 points and a g loading of .864. Fluid Reasoning is at .9727, 2.48 and .922. Working Memory is at .9247, 4.12 and .788. Processing Speed, the least g saturated of the six, is at .8790, 5.22 and .648. The General Ability Index built from the fifteen non speeded subtests reaches an omega of .9885 with a standard error of 1.61 points. The full derivation is in the technical manual.

For a reader who arrived here through a screenwriting question, the relevant part of the report is the verbal side. The verbal ability route covers what a Gc measure samples and what it does not, and the six subtest Quick form at 15 dollars reports Verbal Comprehension, Fluid Reasoning and a partial Working Memory picture in about 45 minutes, using Similarities, Vocabulary, Matrix Reasoning, Figure Weights, Digit Span and Alphanumeric Sequencing. Longer forms are described on the adult testing page, and the case for a supervised administration when the result has to be accepted by an institution is on the page on where to take a test.

Guessing is not a shortcut to the same thing, and the size of the error is documented. Self estimates correlate roughly .30 with measured ability, loose enough that a self placed figure can be wrong by tens of points in either direction, which is the arithmetic worked through on the page on estimating your own intelligence. If you would not accept a stranger's guess about a celebrity, there is no reason to accept your own guess about yourself.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every number and every claim above is traceable to one of the following, and the list is short enough that a reader can check all of it. Primary institutional records come first, then the peer reviewed literature, then the compiled biographical references whose claims are labeled reported rather than documented.

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the 49th Academy Awards, March 28, 1977. Source for the Stallone nominations in Actor in a Leading Role and Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for the winners in both categories, and for the Best Picture, Directing and Film Editing awards to Rocky.
• The 13th Academy Awards, February 27, 1941. Source for the Charles Chaplin double nomination for The Great Dictator.
• The 14th Academy Awards, February 26, 1942. Source for the Orson Welles double nomination for Citizen Kane and his shared writing win with Herman J. Mankiewicz.
• The 88th Academy Awards, February 28, 2016. Source for the supporting actor nomination for Creed.
• American Film Institute Catalog, Rocky, 1976. Source for the Wepner and Ali origin, the three and a half day first draft and two subsequent drafts, the offers up to 275,000 dollars, the refusal to sell without the lead role, the casting alternatives named by Irwin Winkler, and the production budget of about 1,000,000 dollars. The AFI notes cite a November 1976 New York Times interview, a November 1976 Los Angeles Herald Examiner article, a November 1996 Los Angeles Times piece and an April 2001 Variety item.
• Kellogg, R. T. (2008). Training writing skills: a cognitive developmental perspective. Journal of Writing Research, 1(1), 1 to 26. Source for the three stage model and for the statement that writing skill typically develops over more than two decades.
• Roth, B., Becker, N., Romeyke, S., Schaefer, S., Domnick, F., and Spinath, F. M. (2015). Intelligence and school grades: a meta-analysis. Intelligence, 53, 118 to 137. Source for the corrected correlation of .54 across 240 samples and 105,185 participants.
• Strenze, T. (2007). Intelligence and socioeconomic success: a meta-analytic review of longitudinal research. Intelligence, 35(5), 401 to 426. Source for the correlations of about .56 with educational attainment, .43 with occupational status and .20 with income.
• Kell, H. J., Lubinski, D., and Benbow, C. P. (2013). Who rises to the top? Early indicators. Psychological Science, 24(5), 648 to 659. Source for the 320 person cohort identified before age thirteen in the top one in ten thousand and followed to age thirty eight.
• Frey, M. C., and Detterman, D. K. (2004). Scholastic assessment or g? Psychological Science, 15, 373 to 378, with the comment by Bridgeman, B. (2005), Psychological Science, 16, 745 to 746. Source for the SAT and general ability correlations and for the objection to individual level conversion.
• Compiled biographical references for the birth injury, the schools, the American College of Switzerland and University of Miami years, the later conferred degree, and the filmography totals. These are labeled reported throughout because no registrar record, medical record or studio credit file was inspected for this page.

Two items on that list could not be resolved. The year the University of Miami degree was conferred appears as both 1998 and 1999 across references, and no university announcement was located. The origin of the 160 could not be traced to any first publication, journalist, examiner or document, which is the finding rather than a gap in the research.

The professional framework behind all of this is written down and public. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, published jointly in 2014 by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, require that validity evidence be presented for the specific interpretation being made, that reliability and the standard error of measurement be reported so precision is visible, that the norm sample be described so a percentile means something, and that fairness be addressed across the populations tested. A celebrity number fails all four at once, because no construct, no instrument, no sample and no error term is ever named. APA standards on test use add that scores should be interpreted by someone qualified to do so, in light of the conditions of administration, which is impossible for a figure whose only history is having been copied. Those same requirements apply to this site, which is why the self-administered assessment and the non clinical status of ACIS are stated in the body of this page rather than buried in a footer. The International Test Commission guidelines on test use say the same thing in an international frame, and the practical consequences for online instruments are worked through on the page on the accuracy of online tests.

14 Frequently Asked Questions