The IQ Metrics Editorial Team

Aarav Vardhan

Editor-in-Chief

Aarav decides what IQ Metrics publishes and what it does not. He owns the language the site uses about scores — that results are reported on a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, that a score is a band rather than a point, and that one sitting is an indication rather than a verdict. Where a draft drifts towards implying more precision than the instrument has, it goes back to the writer.

He is the standing reviewer on anything that interprets a number for a reader: the eight test format pages, the score and percentile explainers, and the FAQ. He also holds the line the site does not cross — that this is an educational assessment and not a clinical one — and he is the named contact for corrections.

Leon Falkner

Data & Research Analyst

Leon writes the blog and the Celebrity IQ profiles, and he owns the arithmetic underneath both. The percentile tables, the bell curve, the conversions between the standard scale and the Stanford–Binet and Cattell scales in the score converter, and every calculator on the IQ Tools page are his to get right and to keep right.

Both writing beats land with him for the same reason. The blog’s hardest pieces are the ones where the statistics do the work — what a percentile actually is, why a score is a band rather than a point, why an unusually high first result drifts back towards the average on a second sitting. And on the Celebrity IQ profiles he takes the figures: almost every famous IQ number in circulation is an estimate, a childhood test score, or a value copied between websites until it looked like a fact, and saying which is which is arithmetic and provenance before it is writing. Elora Mercer researches the people; the numbers attached to them are his.

He also checks the figures in everyone else’s drafts, which is where most errors on a site like this one would otherwise get through: a percentile quoted against the wrong standard deviation, a national average presented without the sampling caveats that make it comparable, a rarity figure that has quietly dropped a decimal place.

Elora Mercer

Celebrity Research Writer

Elora researches and writes the Celebrity IQ profiles. Her half of that section is the person rather than the number: what is actually documented about someone, which claims about them trace back to a source, and which have simply been repeated between websites until they started to look like facts. Where the record is thin, the profile says so instead of filling the gap.

She also runs the news desk — new studies on intelligence and cognition, changes in how testing is used in schools and workplaces, and the recurring claims about IQ that surface in the press and deserve a straight answer. Each story is written from the paper or the primary announcement, not from somebody else’s coverage of it.

The discipline that matters on both beats is the same: restraint. A single study is a single study — sample size, whether it has replicated, and what the authors themselves declined to claim all belong in the piece. Where a headline elsewhere has outrun the finding it is built on, saying so plainly is usually the story.

Alden Cross

Intelligence Research Writer

Alden writes long-form explainers for the blog — the pieces that have to take a genuinely difficult idea and leave the reader holding it correctly. What the four reasoning domains actually measure. Why a percentile is more useful than a score. Why an unusually high first result tends to drift back towards the average on a second sitting, which is regression to the mean and not a sign that anything has gone wrong.

His working rule is that the caveat belongs in the same paragraph as the claim, not in a disclaimer at the bottom that nobody reads. He works from the psychometric literature rather than from other websites, and where the research is contested he says it is contested instead of picking the tidier answer.

Arjun Vardhan

News & Research Writer

Arjun writes study write-ups for the news desk — the pieces that take a newly published paper and set out what it actually found, who it studied, and how far the finding travels beyond the sample it came from.

He also covers how intelligence testing is used in practice: what schools and employers do with a score, where that use is supported by the evidence and where it has run ahead of it.