YoungHoon Kim's IQ of 276: who certified it, and what no test can measure

0 Quick Answer

YoungHoon Kim's IQ of 276 was announced by the World Mind Sports Council and the World Memory Championships in 2024 and certified by a private records company, and no normed intelligence test in existence reports a score anywhere near it, because every such test stops near 160. The Korea Times reported on November 4, 2025 that the 36 year old, who claims to hold the world's highest IQ of 276, had announced on X that he was seeking asylum in the United States, and that in July 2024 the World Mind Sports Council had announced on its website that he achieved an IQ score of 276 at the World Memory Championships. The council's own page, read on September 19, 2026, states that he has the world's highest IQ 276 in history recognized by the World Mind Sports Council and World Memory Championships, founded by Tony Buzan, and that he established the Official World Record for the title The World's Highest IQ Person Now with IQ 276.

None of those bodies publishes an intelligence test, a norm sample or an examiner's report. The World Memory Championships is a memory sport competition. The Official World Record is a records company. The page on the highest IQ ever explains why no body has been able to award such a title on a normed scale since Guinness retired the category in 1990, and the page on high range IQ tests explains how numbers above 200 are produced: by tests whose norms are extrapolated past any sampled population.

On a deviation scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, a 276 would sit more than eleven standard deviations above the mean, a point at which the normal distribution predicts no human being in the history of the species. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fifth Edition, reports composite scores up to 160. ACIS reports to a ceiling set by its norm frame and states in its technical manual that rarity language above it is compressed. A 276 is therefore not a measurement on any scale a psychologist uses; it is a number produced by a different process, and this page describes that process.

1 What the Certifying Bodies Said, in Their Own Words

Every sentence in the record of the 276 comes from a body that is not a test publisher, and reading the sentences exactly as written is the fastest way to see what they do and do not claim. The World Mind Sports Council's page on Kim, read on September 19, 2026, carries a heading World Record Holder, Highest IQ, and the statement that YoungHoon Kim from South Korea has the world's highest IQ 276 in history recognized by the World Mind Sports Council and World Memory Championships, founded by Tony Buzan, the inventor of Mind Maps. It states that he established the Official World Record for the title The World's Highest IQ Person Now with IQ 276 at the only world record certification body accredited by the Council of the Notariats of the European Union, and that the record was inducted into that company's Hall of Fame. It states that in the Mega Society he was officially recognised as having an intelligence of one in a million, and that he was awarded top ranked honorary memberships from GIGA Society, Esoteriq Society, World Genius Directory and Global Genius Registry.

The Korea Times, in a report by Hankookilbo translated and edited by the newspaper, added the timing: in July 2024 the council announced on its website that Korean Young-hoon Kim achieved an IQ score of 276 at the World Memory Championships, and Korean media had previously described him as recognized by both the Korea Record Institute and the council. The Church Times, in a report of June 27, 2025, noted that on his X profile he identified himself as the World's Highest IQ Record Holder as verified by Guinness World Records.

That last attribution can be checked directly. Guinness World Records retired its highest IQ category in 1990, as the page on Marilyn vos Savant's IQ documents, and has awarded no such record since. Whatever verification exists for the 276 came from the bodies named on the council's page, and the next section describes what each of them is.

2 Who the Bodies Are, and What None of Them Is

The World Mind Sports Council, the World Memory Championships, the Official World Record and the Korea Record Institute are, respectively, a sports council, a memory competition, a records company and a national records registry, and none of them administers or publishes an intelligence test. The World Memory Championships, founded by Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene in 1991, is a competition in memory disciplines: memorizing decks of cards, sequences of numbers, names and faces, against the clock. Its scoring is a count of items recalled, and its champions are memory athletes who train for years in mnemonic techniques. The page on IQ and memory explains why trained memory performance is a different quantity from measured intelligence, and the page on working memory tests explains how a psychologist measures the memory that does relate to reasoning.

The Official World Record is a company that certifies records for a fee, and its accreditation, as the council's page describes it, comes from a notarial body, which certifies that a document was signed, not that a measurement was valid. The Korea Record Institute is a Korean private registry of records of the same kind. A record certified by either is a statement that a claim was registered, and the claim's content is whatever the applicant submitted.

The Mega Society is a different kind of body and the one whose involvement says the most. It describes itself on its own site as an organization of people who have scored at the one in a million level on a test of general intelligence which is credibly claimed by its authors to be able to discriminate at this level, and it lists the tests it accepts: the Mega Test, the Titan Test, the Ultra Test and the Hoeflin Power Test. The same site describes the norming of the first two as extrapolating from reported scores on supervised, timed tests. A one in a million level is a real statistical statement: on a mean 100, standard deviation 15 scale it corresponds to about 171, our arithmetic on the normal distribution. It is not a 276, and the society makes no such claim. The other societies named on the council's page, GIGA, Esoteriq and the two directories, are smaller bodies of the same genre, admitting members on high range tests of their own and publishing rankings that rest on those tests.

3 What 276 Would Mean on a Deviation Scale

On the scale every psychologist uses, 276 is not a rare score; it is a score with no meaning, because the scale is defined by a sampled distribution and no sample contains anyone at that point. A deviation IQ places a person within their age group on a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, a convention that David Wechsler set out in The Measurement of Adult Intelligence in 1939 and that every modern instrument follows. The page on the 15 point standard deviation explains the unit. A 130 is two standard deviations above the mean and the 98th percentile. A 145 is three and the 99.87th. A 160 is four and about one in 30,000. A 175 is five and about one in three million. A 276 is 11.7 standard deviations above the mean, and the normal distribution's tail at that distance is a number with more than 30 zeros after the decimal point, which is to say that fewer than one person in the entire population of humans who have ever lived would be expected there.

The distribution is not the only obstacle. An instrument can only report scores its reference sample can support, which is why the WAIS-5, published by Pearson in 2024 for ages 16 to 90 per its product page, reports composite scores up to 160 and no further. The Stanford-Binet 5 offers extended scoring above its standard ceiling, and even that scoring reports a range rather than a point, as the page on how the Stanford-Binet 5 works describes. The ACIS technical manual sets the ceiling at the edge of its norm frame of 3,243 adults and states that public rarity language is compressed above it. The IQ rarity calculator will convert any score to a frequency, and it will tell a user entering 276 that the frequency is not a meaningful quantity.

A normed test given to Kim would therefore report at most its ceiling, and would say nothing about whether he is above the ceiling by a little or by a lot, because the instrument has no items or no norms with which to say. The 276 is not a claim that any such test has made. It is a claim made by bodies that do not use such tests, and the next section explains what they use instead.

4 How a Number Like 276 Is Produced

High range tests produce numbers above 200 by extending a line past the last person measured, and the Mega Society's own description of its norming is the clearest statement of the method anywhere. A high range test is a set of very hard problems, usually taken at home without time limits, whose author collects submitted answers and relates raw scores to the scores that submitters report having obtained on supervised instruments. The relationship is then extended beyond the range of those supervised scores, which end near 160 because the supervised instruments end there. The society describes this as extrapolating from reported scores on supervised, timed tests, and the phrase contains both problems: the anchoring scores are self reported, and the extension is an extrapolation.

An extrapolated norm can be internally consistent and still describe no population. The page on how IQ scores are normed explains that a norm is a sampled distribution, and a sample of the one in a million level would require measuring millions of people, which no high range test has done. A score of 276 on such a test is an ordinal statement, the person solved more of these problems than most of the people who submitted answers, dressed in the units of a scale that does not extend there. The conditions add a second layer: the International Test Commission's guidelines on internet delivered testing, published in the International Journal of Testing in 2006, volume 6, issue 2, pages 143 to 171, classify an unsupervised, unidentified, untimed administration as open mode and state that such scores support only weak interpretations. A take home test with no time limit cannot bound the role of reference materials, collaboration or repeated attempts, and its author has no way to know how a submitted answer sheet was produced.

None of this is specific to Kim. It is a description of the genre, and the same description applies to every number above 200 that circulates with a name attached, as the page on celebrities with the highest IQ shows for the historical estimates. What is specific to Kim is that the bodies certifying his number did not even name a high range test. The council's page attributes the 276 to the World Memory Championships, and a memory championship is a competition, not a test of any kind.

5 A Memory Championship Is Not an Intelligence Test

Memory sport measures trained recall under time pressure, intelligence tests measure reasoning and knowledge against age norms, and the two overlap far less than the phrase IQ score at the World Memory Championships implies. Memory athletes memorize sequences of digits, cards, words and faces using mnemonic systems, and their performance improves with years of practice in those systems. The technique is learnable by anyone; the literature on working memory training, reviewed on the page on working memory tests, finds that practice improves the practiced task and does not transfer to reasoning. A memory championship score is a record of how well a system has been trained, which is why the same athletes win year after year.

Working memory, the capacity that does relate to intelligence, is measured differently: with span tasks presented at a fixed rate, scored against age norms, and reported with an error band. In the ACIS confirmatory model, fitted on 2,750 complete records and reported in the technical manual, the Working Memory Index loads .788 on the general factor, below reasoning and knowledge and above speed, which is the pattern every modern battery finds. A person who scores at the top of the memory sport world would be expected to score well on span tasks, and the expected score is bounded by the same ceiling as everyone else's. There is no route from a memory championship to a 276, because the championship produces a count and the scale produces a rank, and the count does not convert.

The council's sentence that Kim achieved an IQ score of 276 at the World Memory Championships is therefore a category error rather than a measurement, whatever the council intended by it. It is the kind of sentence that spreads because it contains a number and a name, and the page on what an IQ test measures exists to explain why a number needs a scale, an instrument and a sample before it means anything.

6 A Record Is Not a Measurement

A record certifies that a claim was registered on a date; a measurement states a value, a scale, a sample and an error, and the two words are used interchangeably in every report about the 276. Mensa International, the largest high IQ society in the world, does not rank its members and does not certify scores. Its testing FAQ, read on September 19, 2026, explains why in one sentence: a result on one test of 132 can be the same as a score of 148 on another test, because scales differ, which is why the society uses a percentile rather than an IQ as its admission criterion and treats the question of what someone's IQ is as one that may not have a simple answer. A body that understands scales does not rank across them. A body that certifies a single highest number has not addressed the question of which scale the number is on.

The distinction is the same one that separates a normed instrument from a certificate. A normed instrument publishes its reference sample, so that a score can be read as a rank; its reliability, so that the score has an error band; its conditions, so that a reader knows how the score was obtained; and its ceiling, so that a reader knows where the scale stops. The page on reliability and validity explains each element, and the page on official IQ tests explains what institutions require before they accept a score. A certificate publishes a name, a number and a seal. The seal attests to the registration, and the registration attests to the applicant's submission.

The International Test Commission's guidelines add the question of conditions. A score obtained under supervision, with identification and a controlled environment, supports a stronger interpretation than one obtained in open mode, and the guidelines are explicit about the ordering. No report on the 276 describes the conditions under which any test was taken, because no report describes a test. The council's page attributes the number to a memory competition and to certificates, and the question of conditions does not arise for a certificate.

What follows for a reader is a simple rule that applies far beyond this case. When a number is described as a record, ask what was measured, on what scale, against what sample, under what conditions, and with what error. If the answers exist, the record is a measurement that happened to be registered. If they do not, the record is a registration that happened to contain a number, and the number's authority is the seal's, not the scale's. Every figure reviewed on the page on celebrities with the highest IQ can be sorted by that rule, and the 276 sorts into the second group.

7 The 2025 News Cycle, and Why It Is Not Evidence

The 276 became internationally known in 2025 because of statements about religion and politics, and the coverage repeated the number without examining it, which is the normal life cycle of a famous IQ figure. The Church Times reported on June 27, 2025 that Kim had posted on X that as the world's highest IQ record holder he believed Jesus Christ is God, that the post received 21.5 million views, and that he followed it with posts stating that only Christianity provides a logically sound solution to the problem of evil and that the Bible does not need to be updated. The report described him as founder and chief executive of NeuroStory, an organization working on artificial intelligence and brain health, and as founder of the United Sigma Intelligence Association. The Catholic Herald carried a similar report noting his support for the American president. The Korea Times reported on November 4, 2025 that he had announced he was applying for asylum in the United States, citing political and religious persecution, and was reportedly enrolled in a Master of Theology program at an American seminary.

Each of those reports carried the phrase world's highest IQ in its headline or first paragraph, and none of them examined where the number came from. That is not a criticism of the reporters, whose subject was the statements. It is a description of how the number acquired its authority: by repetition in headlines about something else. A reader who met the 276 in June 2025 met it as an established fact about a person making claims about theology, and the fact was never established.

The statements themselves are outside this page's subject. A person's religious and political views are neither evidence for nor evidence against any claim about their measured ability, and this page takes no position on them. What the news cycle shows is the mechanism by which a number certified by a records company becomes, in the public mind, a number verified by Guinness, which the Church Times report shows his own profile claimed and which Guinness has not done for anyone since 1990.

8 The Pattern: Kim Ung-yong, vos Savant, Sidis

Kim is the third Korean or Korean linked figure and at least the fourth person in the last century to be described as holding the highest IQ in the world, and the pattern across the cases is more informative than any single number. Kim Ung-yong, born in 1962 and no relation, was listed by Guinness in the 1980s with a figure of 210, and the Wikipedia entry, used here only as a pointer to the biography, records a childhood of extraordinary precocity and an adult career as a university professor. Marilyn vos Savant was listed by Guinness with a ratio IQ of 228 from a 1956 Stanford-Binet, and the category was retired in 1990. William James Sidis, who entered Harvard at eleven in 1909, was assigned a posthumous estimate of 250 to 300 by a writer in 1946 without ever having been tested, as the page on William James Sidis's IQ sets out.

The cases differ in their origins and agree in their arithmetic. Kim Ung-yong's 210 and vos Savant's 228 were ratio IQs from children's tests, which describe developmental advancement and not rank, as the page on mental age explains. Sidis's figure was a guess. Kim YoungHoon's 276 is a certification by bodies that name no instrument. None of the four numbers is a deviation score on a normed adult scale, because no such score can be higher than the scale's ceiling, and the ceilings are 160 or close to it. The title of highest IQ in the world is therefore vacant by construction, and every holder of it has held it on a scale that does not exist.

The pattern also shows what the documented record can contain. Kim Ung-yong's professorship, vos Savant's column and her Monty Hall answer, and Sidis's Harvard lecture at eleven are all verifiable acts. They are evidence of ability of a kind a test does not measure, and the page on genius IQ explains why psychologists distinguish eminence from measured intelligence. Kim YoungHoon's record, to the extent it is documented, is examined in the next section.

9 What the Record Documents, and What It Only Claims

The verifiable record on YoungHoon Kim is thin, and the council's page mixes verifiable statements with claims that this page cannot check, so the honest approach is to label each kind. Verifiable: that the World Mind Sports Council and the World Memory Championships announced a figure of 276 in July 2024, per the Korea Times and the council's page; that a private records company registered a record with that figure, per the council's page; that he founded or leads organizations named NeuroStory and the United Sigma Intelligence Association, per the Church Times; that he posted the faith statements and the asylum announcement described above, per the Church Times and the Korea Times; and that he is 36 years old as of November 2025, per the Korea Times.

Claimed on the council's page and not verified here: an honorary professorship from an academy founded by Tony Buzan, a nomination for an honorary doctorate at Queen Mary University of London in 2024, advisory appointments at laboratories at Cambridge and Yale, a research role at a Yonsei University center, and academic degrees in psychology, neuroscience, counseling, coaching, linguistics, sociology, philosophy and theology at unnamed universities. The page also states that the United Sigma Intelligence Association includes seven Nobel laureates and a list of famous names as members; the Church Times described the association as having been described as a non profit for the world's brightest minds with notable members including Richard Dawkins. None of the named individuals or institutions is cited on the council's page as confirming the association, and this page does not treat any of those claims as established.

The distinction matters because the 276 draws its plausibility from the surrounding list. A reader who sees Nobel laureates, Cambridge and Yale on the same page as the number is invited to read the number as belonging to that company. The number's own support is the council's announcement and the records company's certificate, and both are described above. The page on signs of high intelligence explains why a list of affiliations is not a measurement, and the page on are IQ tests biased explains why psychologists insist on standardized conditions precisely so that a score does not depend on who vouches for it.

10 Every Claim on This Page, With Its Label

A page that grades a certification owes the reader a grade on its own claims, so the table below labels every figure and statement above by the evidence behind it. Documented means a primary or contemporaneous record is linked. Announced means a body stated it publicly without publishing the basis. Claimed means it appears on a self published or promotional page and has not been verified here. Arithmetic means it follows from a published scale and a stated number.

The last row is the row that answers the search. There is no published administration of a normed instrument to YoungHoon Kim, no examiner, no date, no scale and no standard error. The page on types of IQ tests explains what such an administration would consist of, and the page on reliability and validity explains why a score without those elements cannot be interpreted.

11 What It Would Take to Support the Claim

The claim is not unfalsifiable; it is unmeasurable, because the only instruments that could test it stop three or four standard deviations below the number. A normed administration to Kim would produce a Full Scale IQ with a standard error, and if his ability were as high as the certifying bodies say, the instrument would report its ceiling, 160 on the WAIS-5, and stop. That result would be consistent with a true ability of 161 and with a true ability far higher, and the instrument could not say which. The Stanford-Binet 5's extended scoring would report a range above 160 rather than a point. Neither would produce a 276, and neither could refute it, because 276 is not a value on their scales.

What a normed administration could do is what it does for anyone: describe a profile. It would report verbal, reasoning, quantitative, spatial, working memory and speed indices, each with a band, and it would show which were at the ceiling and which were not, which is the only kind of information about a very able person that a test can give. The page on the gifted IQ range explains what the top of a normed scale resolves, and the page on the g factor explains why a general factor estimated from many indicators is more informative than any single extreme score.

The bodies that certified the 276 could support their claim by publishing what a test publisher publishes: the instrument, its items or item statistics, its norm sample, its reliability, the conditions of administration and the examiner. They have published a number and a certificate. Until the rest exists, the honest statement about YoungHoon Kim's IQ is that it has not been measured on any scale a psychologist would recognize, and that no measurement on such a scale could produce the figure attached to his name.

12 Measuring Your Own Profile Instead of Ranking His

The question behind a search for the world's highest IQ is rarely about the record holder; it is about where the searcher stands, and that question has an answer with a band around it. ACIS is a normed online battery of 20 subtests across six domains, scored against an adult reference frame of 3,243 records in age bands from 16 to 90, and its technical manual, version 1.4 updated August 3, 2026, reports a Full Scale IQ composite reliability of .9886 with a standard error of 1.60 points and a reliability and standard error for every index and subtest. We sell it, which the reader should weigh against everything on this page, and it is not accepted for Mensa admission or any institutional purpose.

Its treatment of the ceiling is the relevant feature here. The manual states that the ceiling is set by the norm frame and that public rarity language above it is compressed rather than extrapolated. A person who reaches the ceiling receives the ceiling, its standard error and a note that the instrument cannot resolve further. That is the opposite of the process that produced the 276, and it is why no ACIS report will ever carry a number that a records company could certify as the highest in the world. The page on IQ score versus percentile explains what the top of the scale means in rank terms.

The forms are priced one time: 15 dollars for six subtests, 30 for thirteen, 50 for all twenty, and a per subtest price for a custom selection on the order page. Five subtests are free without a card, purchased access stays open for 30 days, and the quality guarantee is a full refund within five days if the report does not deliver the features described at checkout or a technical issue prevents access. The limits are the ones stated across this site: self administered rather than supervised, normed on English speaking adults, and a Visual Spatial Index affected by the retirement of one subtest on September 7, 2026 pending the next edition's tables.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every figure above is traceable to one of the following, and each is linked at the point where it is used. The World Mind Sports Council page and the news reports were read on September 19, 2026 and may change; Wikipedia is cited only as a pointer to the biography of Kim Ung-yong. The standard deviation and rarity arithmetic is ours on the normal distribution and is labelled as such.

• World Mind Sports Council. WMSC YoungHoon Kim, page describing the world record recognition, the Official World Record certification and the society memberships. worldmindsportscouncil.com, read September 19, 2026.
• Hankookilbo, translated and edited by The Korea Times. World's highest IQ holder Kim Young-hoon says he is seeking asylum in US. The Korea Times, November 4, 2025.
• Paveley R. IQ record-holder: Only Christianity has the answers. Church Times, June 27, 2025.
• Catholic Herald. World's highest IQ holder affirms Christian faith on X and voices support for Trump. thecatholicherald.com, 2025.
• The Mega Society. Constitution, admission standards and tests accepted for admission, with the description of the norming as extrapolation. megasociety.org, read September 19, 2026.
• Mensa International. Getting your IQ tested: FAQs, on the admission percentile and on scores differing across tests. mensa.org, read September 19, 2026.
• Wechsler D. The Measurement of Adult Intelligence. Williams and Wilkins, 1939. archive.org.
• Pearson. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fifth Edition (WAIS-5), product page. pearsonassessments.com, read September 19, 2026.
• International Test Commission. International Guidelines on Computer-Based and Internet-Delivered Testing. International Journal of Testing, 2006, volume 6, issue 2, pages 143 to 171.
• Wikipedia. Kim Ung-yong, used as a pointer to the biography and to the Guinness listing. wikipedia.org, read September 19, 2026.
• ACIS. Technical manual, version 1.4, updated August 3, 2026: norm frame, ceiling and rarity language, confirmatory factor analysis output. acisiq.com/technical-manual.

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