What is Kim Namjoon’s IQ?
Kim Namjoon’s IQ level of 148 is a score he confirmed himself on Korean television, but it is about 1 in 1,450 on a 15-point scale and only the top 2% on a 24-point one, and no report says which was used.

Search “RM BTS IQ” or “what is the IQ of Kim Namjoon” and nearly every page that offers a number gives the same one: 148. Koreaboo (October 15, 2022) states that RM’s IQ is 148 and calls him a “certified genius,” without naming a test. iqtesta.com prints 148 with a “top 0.1%” label and no source. Soompi’s June 24, 2019 list article puts the figure in its headline and gives it no source. armybangtanworld.com’s 2026 ranking of the IQ of BTS members lists 148 for RM, credits AllKpop, and warns that most members’ figures come from fan discussions and variety-show moments rather than verified records. realiqtest.org (March 20, 2024) prints no IQ for any BTS member and says an exact number is speculation unless it comes with a named test, date and primary source. For the general pattern, see where celebrity IQ numbers come from: a figure survives because it is easy to repeat.

The trail leads to a television studio, not a testing room. tvN’s quiz-and-talk show Problematic Men (뇌섹시대-문제적 남자) premiered on February 26, 2015 with RM, then 20, as its youngest cast member. Veritas Alpha (March 5, 2015) and Sports Kyunghyang (April 20, 2015) report that MC Jun Hyun-moo introduced him with an IQ of 148 and a top-1% mock-exam score, and that RM answered that 148 was correct and had been measured four years earlier, in his second year of high school, so around 2011, when he was 16 or 17. TenAsia and eToday had already carried the number on February 27. That makes the figure better attributed than most on this site: it is his own statement, not an anonymous listicle. It still names no test, examiner, date or scale. Noisey (May 26, 2015) then made it the reason he was cast, and English Wikipedia’s RM article states it as a fact of his student years, citing that Noisey piece.

Kim Namjoon’s IQ level cannot be read off a bare 148, because the number means different things on different scales. On the standard 15-point scale it is 3.2 standard deviations above the mean, roughly 1 person in 1,450; on the 16-point scale it is 3.0, about 1 in 740 (see why the standard deviation matters); on a 24-point scale it is 2.0, roughly the top 2%. That last scale is not exotic. American Mensa’s own table lists 148 as the qualifying score on the Cattell test, 132 on the original Stanford–Binet and 130 on Wechsler tests, one cutoff expressed three ways (see Mensa’s qualifying scores), and Korean Wikipedia’s IQ article notes that the Korean press often presents a 24-point spread as the local norm. No report on RM says which scale his test used. Mensa also wants the test’s full name, the score and the percentile on letterhead, and requires school-transcript evidence to be a sealed school document; nothing published about RM’s 148 supplies any of that.

The companion numbers drift as they travel, the clearest sign of copying. RM said on Mnet’s Beatles Code 3D in April 2014 that his national mock-exam scores were about the top 1.3%; in 2015 the tvN MC called it the top 1%; English Wikipedia recasts it as the “university entrance examinations,” and armybangtanworld.com files it under 2015 entrance exams. His school-years TOEIC score is given as 900 by TenAsia, 850 by eToday and 800 by CNB. A mock-exam rank is an achievement measure, not an IQ result (see achievement tests versus IQ tests), and one score from age 16 or 17 tends to sit above a retest (see regression to the mean). The sourced record therefore supports a lower range than 148: 130–145, level with Beyoncé and Alicia Keys, above Shakira’s 125–140, whose 140 also circulates without a test, and below Brian May’s 140–155, which rests on a completed doctorate.