Not dumb at all

In January, the UPI published this under-covered nugget: an article on George W. Bush's Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. The President scored a 1206 (when he took it, the SAT didn't score by ten-point increments). Under today's scoring system, that equates to a 1280. Under the scoring system when The Monk took his SAT in 1987, that's about a 1230-1250 (the SAT curved its scores upward in the mid-1990s).

A 1280 puts the President squarely in the top 10% of test-takers, and then some. And some experts who understand IQ testing said this:

Linda Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, told United Press International: "I recently converted Bush's SAT score to an IQ using the high school norms available for his age cohort. Educational Testing Service happened to have done a study of representative high school students within a year or so of when he took the test. I derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile." In other words, only one out of 20 people would score higher.

Another IQ expert, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, the co-author of the bestseller "The Bell Curve," came up with a similar result when asked by UPI. Noting that everybody except high school dropouts takes the PSAT when they are sophomores, Murray calculated from PSAT scores that "I think you're safe in saying that Dubya's IQ, based on his SAT score, is in excess of 120, which puts him the top 10 percent of the distribution, but I wouldn't try to be more precise than that."

Of course this was under-reported in the press: the vast majority of pundits and journos (who think they're so smart and the President is a dope) did not score anywhere NEAR 1200+ on the SAT. Your faithful blogger did, however, outscore both the President and his previous rival, Al Gore (1355), therefore The Monk can ridicule the press with great ease of mind.