Five points buys you a crowd near the middle and almost nobody at the tails.
The bell curve bunches people near 100, so 95→100 spans a large slice of the population. The same step out at 145→150 separates a tiny fraction. Pick a gap.
When studies model "the average person", that person is essentially you.
A score near 95 is the opposite of rare: about 37% of people score at or below it, and most of the rest are only a few points higher.Almost no common career path is closed on cognitive grounds
Most jobs draw heavily from roughly the 90 to 110 band. Meta-analyses of job performance put cognitive ability at its most useful in highly complex work and much less so in routine work. Across that broad middle, experience, conscientiousness and the specific skill routinely matter more.
Four levers the test doesn't touch
Your 95, against your grandparents' norms
Raw scores climbed about 3 points a decade through much of the twentieth century, so tests get re-normed to hold the mean at 100. Hover a decade. It is also why setting your 95 beside an old score, or beside an internet test running on stale norms, tells you very little.
A bakery sells loaves in boxes of 6. A cafe orders 4 boxes on Monday and 3 on Tuesday, then returns 5 stale loaves. How many does it keep?
Type your answer. Working memory is the real test here: three steps, one number in your head at a time.Percentiles, overlaps and gap shares are computed from a normal distribution (mean 100, SD 15). Job-performance, expertise and Flynn points summarise published research, not this site's data.