Is a 276 IQ Possible? YoungHoon Kim's Claim Checked

Is a 276 IQ possible? Not as a measurement. YoungHoon Kim's 276 is stated on a scale where one step is 24 points instead of the usual 15. Converted to the standard scale it is 210, a rarity of about 1 in 8.9 trillion, more than a thousand times the number of people alive. His own organisations trace the figure to a perfect score on a 32-item, untimed online test, the VNPT-II, whose top score was mapped to 210 using 32 people. Independent experts quoted by VICE in July 2025 estimated his real score at roughly 160 to 175, and Guinness World Records has not recognised him.

Since 2024, YoungHoon Kim, a South Korean who presents himself online as "IQ 276", has been described in press releases, social media posts and some news coverage as the person with the highest IQ in the world. A post by Kim on X in June 2025 had passed 14 million views by 19 June, according to the National Catholic Register. A number like 276 raises one question before any other: what test produced it? The answer is findable, and it explains the number better than any argument about Kim himself.

Who is YoungHoon Kim?

Kim Young-hoon, as the name is written in Korean order, is a South Korean who, according to a Yonsei University alumni interview of October 2024, transferred into Yonsei's College of Theology and was studying for a master's degree in counselling and coaching there. He founded the United Sigma Intelligence Association and runs a site called GIGA Society Professional. That organisation is separate from the Giga Society founded in 1996 by the Dutch test designer Paul Cooijmans, who told VICE that Kim began using the name in 2021 without his permission.

Two recognitions are cited most often. The same alumni interview says the Korea Record Institute acknowledged him as the highest-IQ holder in November 2023. On 18 July 2024 the World Mind Sports Council, which organises the World Memory Championships, issued a statement recognising him as "the person with the highest IQ in the world", which The Korea Herald reported with the 276 figure. The World Memory Championships is a memory-sport tournament, not a standardised intelligence test, and VICE reported that Kim holds a vice-presidency there.

What does 276 mean on the normal IQ scale?

Kim's own sites state the claim as "IQ 276 (SD24), equivalent to IQ 210 (SD15)". SD is standard deviation, the size of one step away from the average on a given scale. Clinical tests such as the Wechsler scales use steps of 15 points. Some high-IQ clubs, including Mensa in several countries, use a Cattell-style scale with steps of 24, which makes every score above 100 look bigger. On that scale Mensa's top-2% entry point is 148, the same position as 130 on the Wechsler scale.

The conversion is simple. 276 is 176 points above 100, which on a 24-point scale is 7.33 steps. Seven and a third steps of 15 points is 110, so 276 on the SD 24 scale equals 210 on the SD 15 scale. Our IQ score converter does this for any score, and our piece on why one percentile has three different numbers explains the scale problem in detail.

• 276 on the SD 24 scale is 7.33 steps above the average of 100
• The same position on the SD 15 scale used by the Wechsler tests is 210
• On an SD 16 scale, as the Stanford-Binet used, it would be about 217
• Mensa's entry point on the SD 24 scale is 148, which is 2 steps above average, the 97.7th percentile, and the same position as 130 on the SD 15 scale

What IQ test did YoungHoon Kim take?

In July 2025, Kim's United Sigma Intelligence Association published a list of his scores. It identified the source of the 210 (SD 15) as a perfect score on the VNPT-II, a test by Kirk Raymond Butt, founder of the Global Genius Registry. Butt's own test paper, titled VNPT-2 (Verbal and Numerical Power Test), sets out how it works:

• It has 32 items
• "There is no time restriction", and two submissions are allowed
• "Use of references, including the internet, is allowed"
• Answers are emailed to the author, who scores them and issues a certificate
• Its first norm report, from March 2024, is based on 32 first submissions, and it maps a raw score of 31 to an IQ of 196 and a perfect 32 to 210 (SD 15)
• The November 2023 version of the paper had listed a perfect score only as "185+"

In other words, the highest score on this test became 210 when the norm table was revised, on the basis of 32 people who chose to take it. Butt is also listed on Kim's GIGA Society Professional site as a member of its advisory board. Tests of this kind, untimed and unsupervised, are known as high-range tests, and our guide to how high-IQ societies work explains why their numbers become shakier the more exclusive the claim.

VICE, which reached the same 210 and VNPT-II through an anonymous expert, called a sample of 32 "almost completely useless" for such a claim. Antjuan Finch, one of the high-range test experts it quoted, pointed out that the report gave no correlations, no reliability estimates and no distribution of scores, and called the switch from a standard deviation of 15 to 24 suspect.

Is a 276 IQ possible?

No test can show it, and the arithmetic says why. A modern IQ is a position, not a quantity: it says how rare a performance is compared with a reference group. So a score can be checked by asking how rare it claims to be. On a normal distribution, 7.33 standard deviations above average is about 1 person in 8.9 trillion. The world has about 8.2 billion people, so the claim describes a rarity more than 1,000 times the size of the human population. To place one person that far out, a test would need a norm group of trillions, not 32.

• IQ 145 (SD 15) is about 1 person in 741
• IQ 160 is about 1 in 31,600, and 160 is where the standard ranges of the WAIS-IV and WAIS-5 stop
• IQ 190 is about 1 in a billion
• IQ 200 is about 1 in 76 billion, more than nine times the world's population
• The rarest score you would expect to find even once among 8.2 billion people is about 195 on the SD 15 scale, or about 252 on the SD 24 scale
• 210 (SD 15), the same as 276 (SD 24), is about 1 in 8.9 trillion

Clinical tests stop near 160 for a reason our article on the ceiling on an IQ test sets out: the WAIS-IV was normed on 2,200 people, and a sample of that size would be expected to contain no one at 160. Supplementary procedures can go further, such as extended norms for the WISC-V children's test that reach 210, but they come with explicit warnings about precision. A norm group of 32 is far smaller still. Kim's organisation also reports a WAIS score of 160, which is that test's ceiling rather than a measurement beyond it.

Does YoungHoon Kim have the highest recorded IQ?

No independent body has verified it. The "world's highest IQ" listings that carry the 276 come from organisations connected to Kim, including his own GIGA Society Professional. In its July 2025 investigation, VICE reported that Marek Kasperski, president of the World Mind Sports Council, had never seen evidence of the score, and that Raymond Keene, president of the World Memory Championships, made Kim a vice-president of that body without seeing any. VICE also found that Guinness World Records has never mentioned him, and wrote that not a single expert it asked believed he holds the world's highest IQ.

The experts it did quote put the score far lower. Chris Leek, honorary president of Mensa International, called extrapolating a figure of 276 "a nonsense". Paul Cooijmans wrote that he saw no justification for the claim. Jason Betts, who runs the World Genius Directory, a long-running register of high-range test results, told VICE he did not believe Kim's IQ was above 175. Finch estimated from the data VICE saw that the real score lay between 160 and 172, and a former chair of Mensa Korea said Kim is a member but does not have a special score by Mensa standards. Kim has published rebuttals to his critics on his own sites.

The January 2025 case shows how the title spreads. The Swiss outlet Blick reported on 17 January 2025 that the leader of a German political party had posted that Kim, whom the post called the officially listed smartest person in the world, supported the party, and that the posts were deleted once doubts arose about the title. Blick, citing the German outlet T-Online, said Kim had built a network of organisations that award each other records. Guinness World Records, the obvious referee, retired its "Highest IQ" category in 1990 because it judged the tests not uniform or reliable enough to name a single record holder. Our article on where celebrity IQ figures come from covers that decision.

How does 276 compare with other "highest IQ" claims?

• Marilyn vos Savant, 228: a score she is reported to have earned at age ten on the Stanford-Binet Form L-M, a ratio IQ (mental age divided by chronological age). Guinness listed it from 1986 to 1989, then dropped the category
• William James Sidis, 250 to 300: estimates made by later writers from his early achievements, never a test result
• Terence Tao, about 230: a figure attributed to a childhood test, which The Korea Herald repeated when it announced Kim's title
• YoungHoon Kim, 276 on an SD 24 scale: 210 on the usual scale, from a perfect score on an untimed home test
• Clinical tests such as the WAIS-IV and WAIS-5: report up to 160

The figures are not comparable. The childhood numbers come from ratio IQ, a formula that rewards being years ahead of your age and lets a child "score" above 200 without being that rare. Kim's number is a stretched deviation scale. Our guide to the highest IQ ever recorded traces each famous figure to its source, and the profiles of William James Sidis, Terence Tao and Christopher Langan show what each number rests on.

How to check any "highest IQ" claim

• Ask for the standard deviation. A number over 200 on an SD 24 or SD 16 scale is not comparable with a clinical score until it is converted
• Ask for the test. A supervised, timed test normed on thousands of people is a different kind of evidence from an untimed take-home test normed on dozens
• Ask for the norm sample. A norm group can only place scores it contains; beyond that, the table is extrapolation
• Ask who issued the ranking, and whether they have a connection to the person ranked
• Convert the claim to a rarity. Anything rarer than about 1 in 8 billion describes more people than exist

None of this establishes Kim's actual ability, which may well be very high; several of his critics place it in the 160s or 170s. What it establishes is that 276 is not a measurement in any sense a psychologist would recognise. It is a perfect score on a small, unsupervised test, placed on a stretched scale, and extrapolated to a rarity the human population cannot contain. To see what a conventionally reported result looks like, our IQ test gives a score with its percentile, and our explainer on why no IQ test can reliably score you above 160 covers the limits every real test runs into. For the rarity of any score, the IQ percentile calculator does the arithmetic above.

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