An EQ score of 130 or above
On an IQ test this number has a specific, well-normed meaning. On an EQ test it mostly measures the scale running out of road.
What the region claims, and why to doubt it
Two standard deviations above the mean is the top two in a hundred by construction, and on IQ tests the region is mapped by a century of norming. A mean-100 EQ scale prints the same number with none of that behind it. Worse, the top of a self-report scale is thinly furnished: few items separate the very high scorer from the merely high one, so the region compresses flattery, ceiling and a handful of extreme answers into a figure that looks like giftedness.
That is the borrowing at its most seductive. "An EQ of 132" reads like an aptitude credential, and what it records is that one instrument’s norm sample rarely answered as generously as you did. The two numbers are not relatives.
If your score is here
Hold it lightly and triangulate. Ask what the situational or performance part of the test said, if it had one, because agreement between a very high self-report and scored behaviour is rarer and far more meaningful than the headline. Ask someone who will be straight with you whether the portrait matches. A genuine strength survives the checking, and the checking is free.
What it cannot support
Certification. No consumer questionnaire can certify exceptional emotional ability, ours included, and a certificate that implies otherwise is decoration. Where our own results are concerned the report states the band and the margin, and the top band explicitly is not a claim of rarity, because we will not assert a queue position we cannot compute.
How we handle it
We publish every score as a percentage of its own maximum with its margin printed beside it, and the method is public. The test is free to take; the free result shows your classification and the shape of your profile, and the full scored report, every figure with its margin, is available as a one-off purchase or inside membership.
The scale’s other extreme, below 70, fails differently and is worth reading as the mirror of this page.
The rest of this family
Every page here does the same job for a different number: the full set is indexed on the hub.
Find out how you read a room, and how you handle one.
54 questions, about 12 minutes. Free to take, and your band is free to see.
Take the EQ test