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Bush carries the other end of the same 2001 hoax already documented on John F. Kennedy’s page — except here the fake number is lower than the real estimate, not higher, which makes it the clearest reversal of this site’s usual pattern.
The Simonton estimate is built mostly on a single directly-measured input — an Openness-to-Experience rating whose own authors called it tentative, since it was assessed differently for Bush than for other presidents in the study. Treat the range as a documented academic estimate, not a test score.
Set the claim aside for a moment. If someone genuinely scored in this range, here is what that would represent.
Average is 100 by construction, and about two-thirds of people fall between 85 and 115. Take the test to place your own score on this scale.
| Score range | Classification | Share of people | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|---|
| 85 – 114 | Average | ~68% | The range most people fall into. |
| 115 – 129 | Above average | ~13.6% | Roughly one person in seven. |
| 130 – 144 | Gifted | ~2% | The threshold most high-IQ societies use. |
| Above 144 | Highly gifted | ~0.1% | Figures above this range are extrapolated from the curve rather than measured. |
Percentages are approximate and describe a normal distribution. The same number means different things on tests with different standard deviations.
Thirty questions gives you a measured position on this exact scale — your score, your percentile and the ability breakdown behind it.
Find out in 30 minutes →George W. Bush was born in 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut, attended Phillips Academy and Yale, graduating in 1968, and served in the Texas Air National Guard before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1975.
He led the ownership group that bought the Texas Rangers in 1989, was elected Governor of Texas in 1994, and became the 43rd President of the United States in 2001, serving two terms that included the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War.
Separately from the IQ question, a 2002 content analysis of his public speeches found his “integrative complexity” markedly lower than every elected president from McKinley to Carter — an independent measure, using a different method entirely, that Simonton’s 2006 paper cites as pointing in a broadly similar direction to its own low estimate relative to other presidents.
By Elora Mercer, Celebrity Research WriterFigures checked by Leon Falkner, Data & Research AnalystThe estimate above rests on this record. Every entry here is a matter of public fact, which is more than can be said for the number itself.
Following a claim back to its first appearance is the part almost nobody does — and it is what most people are actually asking.
Read this page next to John F. Kennedy’s. Both men had a real number replaced in public memory by the same fabricated 2001 ranking — but the direction of the error is opposite. Kennedy’s hoax figure (174) inflated a real, unremarkable 119. Bush’s hoax figure (91) deflates real, unremarkable estimates in the low 120s.
The strongest documented figure is not a test at all: a 2006 peer-reviewed historiometric study by psychologist Dean Simonton statistically estimated Bush’s IQ at 111–139, averaging around 125, using methods built on decades of research into all 42 US presidents. Simonton’s own paper explicitly rejects the Lovenstein hoax by name, and separately notes that Bush’s estimate sits in the “upper 10%” of the general population — real intelligence, if below the average for people who reach the presidency.
A commonly repeated claim — that Bush and John Kerry had directly comparable SAT scores released during the 2004 campaign — does not hold up. Bush’s 1206 was reported by the Washington Post in March 2000, compared there with Gore’s 1355. Kerry’s SAT has never been published; his own on-air response to Tom Brokaw in October 2004, when asked about a comparison, was “I don’t know how they’ve done it… because my record is not public.” The 2004 comparison used a different test, Kerry’s Navy officer aptitude score, as a proxy.
How we read a number →A peer-reviewed statistical estimate covering all 42 presidents, explicitly written to engage with and reject cruder estimates including the Lovenstein hoax. The source of the 111–139 (avg. ~125) range.
First public report of Bush’s 1206 SAT score, alongside Gore’s 1355, drawn from confidential school records obtained by the Post.
Fabricated. No such institute exists. The same hoax already documented on this site’s John F. Kennedy page; assigned Bush 91, the lowest figure in its ranking.
Confirm his degrees; Harvard Business School’s own materials note he is the only US president to hold an MBA.
No US president from Bush through the present has ever released a verified IQ test score.
The figures that circulate for George W. Bush, what we were able to confirm, and where the two diverge.
91 is the figure attached to Bush from a July 2001 report ranking presidential IQs, which placed him lowest of the presidents covered.
The “Lovenstein Institute” is a fabrication — the same one that gave John F. Kennedy an invented 174 on this site’s companion page. It began as satire, complete with self-undermining details (a “readership of five,” an institute director living in a mobile home) that were stripped out as the story spread. The Guardian ran it as fact on 19 July 2001; Doonesbury used it in a strip that August; both later corrected. It resurfaced as fact again in Spanish-language media in 2007. In this hoax, Bush was ranked lowest at 91 and Bill Clinton highest at 182 — with Kennedy’s already-documented 174 in between.
This is the reverse of the usual pattern on this site: the hoax figure (91) sits well below the documented SAT-anchored estimates (roughly 120–125), not above them. Most fabricated presidential IQ figures inflate; this one deflates.
Want a number that does hold up? Every figure on this page is somebody’s claim. Take the 30-question test and get a percentile you can check rather than a figure you have to trust.
No test score exists. His SAT (1206) is documented, and a 2006 peer-reviewed historiometric study estimated his IQ at 111–139, averaging about 125.
No — it is from the same fabricated July 2001 “Lovenstein Institute” report that gave John F. Kennedy an invented 174 and Bill Clinton 182. No such institute exists.
No — a common misremembering. Bush’s 1206 was reported by the Washington Post in 2000, compared there with Al Gore. Kerry’s SAT has never been released; a 2004 comparison used his Navy officer aptitude score instead.
Yes — an MBA from Harvard Business School (1975), making him the only US president to hold one.
Yes — Dean Simonton’s 2006 peer-reviewed study in Political Psychology, using statistical historiometric methods, not a real test.
It runs the opposite direction from most invented IQ figures on this site: the fake 91 is lower than the documented estimates of roughly 120–125, not higher.
You can find out in about fifteen minutes. The IQ Metrics assessment is 30 questions, scored on the same 100-mean scale used throughout this page, so your result and the estimate above are at least expressed in the same units — one measured, one inferred. Once you have a number, the leaderboard shows where it would sit, and how we score and norm it explains the benchmarking.
From the documented record rather than a test — the method is named above and set out in full under how we read a number. Compare it against the other politics profiles, starting with Thomas Jefferson.
Portrait © Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The background-removed portrait above is a derivative work and is likewise offered under the same licence. · Portrait © Debbie Rowe / The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0. The background-removed portrait above is a derivative work and is likewise offered under the same licence. · Portrait by Christopher Smith, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — a work of the U.S. federal government, public domain. Background removed for the portrait above.
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