An EQ score is not an IQ score

Why the numbers look alike

IQ scoring settled a century ago on a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, backed by large norm samples and decades of standardisation. When emotional intelligence instruments arrived, many adopted the same shape, and whatever the reasoning, the effect is commercial: a 115 printed on an EQ report borrows the interpretive weight of a 115 in IQ, where the reader already knows what one standard deviation above the mean feels like.

The borrowing conceals a real difference. There is no canonical EQ scale, no shared norming tradition behind one, and the tests using the mean-100 shape do not agree with each other about who scores what. Two people can sit two mean-100 EQ tests and land fifteen points apart without either test being broken. That disagreement has its own page.

The two constructs barely touch

Self-report EQ scores correlate close to zero with IQ, so knowing one tells you close to nothing about the other. Ability-style EQ tests overlap somewhat more, and even there the link is far too weak to read the two numbers on one scale. A 130 in IQ is a claim about a well-mapped distribution. The same number in EQ is a claim about one instrument’s norm sample, and the region above 130 is the least trustworthy on the whole scale.

How we handle it

We refuse the mean-100 shape entirely, because publishing one without a norming tradition behind it would be borrowing credibility we have not earned.

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 rest of this family

Every page here does the same job for a different number: the full set is indexed on the hub.