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YoungHoon Kim is widely described as having the world's highest IQ, 276. The number comes from a perfect score on a 32-question, untimed online test that allows internet use, normed on 32 test takers and stated on a scale with a standard deviation of 24. Here is what that score can and cannot mean.
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. The claim reached a vast audience in June 2025, when a post by Kim on X that opened by calling himself the world's highest IQ record holder had passed 14 million views by the next day, 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.
Kim Young-hoon studied theology at Yonsei University in Seoul and appeared on the SBS television programme Finding Genius in 2015. 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, whose site warns about imitators.
His claimed figure has changed over time. In November 2023 the Korea Record Institute certified him at IQ 202 on the Wechsler scale, or 264 on the scale Mensa Korea uses. The 276 figure appears in his material from 2024 onward. In July 2024 the World Mind Sports Council issued a statement recognising him as the person with the highest IQ in the world.
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.
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:
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.
A norm table built from 32 volunteers cannot locate one person in 8.9 trillion. It can only extend a curve far past its last data point.
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.
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.
The "world's highest IQ" listings that carry the 276 come from organisations connected to Kim, including his own GIGA Society Professional. In a July 2025 investigation by VICE, the presidents of the World Memory Championships and the World Mind Sports Council both said they had not seen evidence of the score. Chris Leek, honorary president of Mensa International, called extrapolating a figure of 276 "a nonsense", and a former chair of Mensa Korea said Kim did not have a special score by Mensa standards. Kim has published rebuttals to his critics on his own sites.
Independent listings put him lower. The World Genius Directory, a long-running register of high-range test results kept by Jason Betts, listed Kim with scores of 190 and 175 as of September 2026, and Betts told VICE he did not believe Kim's IQ was above 175. 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.
A real IQ score names its scale, its norm group and its margin of error. If you want a result reported that way, take a timed test that shows all three.
Find your IQ score now! →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.
Not in any clinically measured sense. The 276 is stated on a scale with a standard deviation of 24, equal to 210 on the usual scale, and it comes from a perfect score on the VNPT-2, a 32-item untimed test that allows internet use and was normed on 32 test takers.
According to his own organisation, a perfect score on the VNPT-II by Kirk Raymond Butt. The test paper, VNPT-2, has 32 items, no time limit and allows references including the internet. Its March 2024 norm table maps a perfect score to 210 on the SD 15 scale, which is 276 on the SD 24 scale.
No one can be verified. Guinness World Records retired its highest-IQ category in 1990 because tests were not uniform or reliable enough at the extremes, and clinical tests such as the WAIS report only up to 160. Claims far above that come from unsupervised high-range tests with small norm groups.
On a standard deviation of 24, 276 is 7.33 standard deviations above average, equal to 210 on the usual scale. On a normal curve that is about 1 person in 8.9 trillion, more than 1,000 times the world's population of about 8.2 billion.
Corrections: spotted an error? Email corrections@iqmetrics.org and we will update this story and note the change here.
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