Doc Searls does some interesting musing about IQ scores and their meaning.

Doc, I’ll toss something in from the other side of the equation than most of the other correspondents. You see, I know from personal experience that IQ is a meaningless indicator of future performance. My IQ was tested many times, mainly because i was the highest in my school. It was fairly consistent, never below 150 and only once approaching 180. And never once was I at the top of my class in school, nor have I really accomplished anything major in The Real World (I have one patent, but that’s more an indication of a sloppy patent system than my brilliance).

Teachers were a disappointment to me, in the main. Especially my seventh-grade English teacher.

It was in seventh grade that I started to become interested in writing. I wrote a poem for one class assignment, the best work I’d ever done. When I read it in class, dear Miss Schwingle dryly announced to the class that my mother had written most of it. (Truth time: It was a five-stanza poem, 4 lines per stanza, abab rhyme scheme, iambic meter with 4 beats alternating with 3 beats per line. Mother helped me with three words out of the entire poem. My vocabulary was larger than most of my teachers, but I’d learned years before that it wasn’t a good idea to let them know that.) While gathering material for a report I was making several trips to the encyclopedias, and she called me out in front of the class to explain why I was making so many trips. When I explained what I was doing, she hit me with a sarcastic “nice to see you’re finally interested in doing something.” Can you think of a better way to discourage achievement?

I learned my lesson well. Achievement is not wanted. So I dialed down the activity, and have been middle ever since. (Except in math. A dear old man, Mr Goodrich — who restored Model A’s in his spare time — caught me at my “just get along” game and publicly threatened me with a “D double minus” if I didn’t straighten up and give him what he knew I could. Thank you and Bless you, Victor Goodrich, for that. I knew no one would fail me, so a threat of an F never got my attention. Your “D Double Minus,” was improbable and humorous enough, though to rouse me. Hence the A’s in math until I finally gave up on the education system in college (note “education system”, not “education.”)

So here I sit, blaming my teachers and the education system for my lifelong non-achievement? No. I’m quite rational and I know it’s my fault, not theirs. I’m the defective person, they were simply my enablers.

And that’s my point. IQ measures just one portion of the person, and that one facet is never the sole arbiter of success. To use an analogy, an IQ score merely measures the depth of a well. Until you know the quality of the water and the strength and maintainability of the pump, you really don’t know if the well can support a building.