http://www.csbsju.edu/uspp/Election/bush011401.htm
January 14, 2001
Bush gets bad rap on intelligence
By Aubrey Immelman
Times columnist
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George W. Bush can be likable and charming. But, as the New York Times pondered in a front-page article on June 19, 2000, "is he smart enough to be president?"
Unlike John F. Kennedy, who obtained an IQ score of 119, or Al Gore, who achieved scores of 133 and 134 on intelligence tests taken at the beginning of his high school freshman and senior years, no IQ data are available for George W. Bush. But we do know that the young Bush registered a score of 1206 on the SAT, the most widely used test of college aptitude. (The more cerebral Al Gore obtained 1355.)
Statistically, Bush's test performance places him in the top 16 percent of prospective college students — hardly the mark of a dimwit. Of course, the SAT is not designed as an IQ test. But it is highly correlated with general intelligence, to the tune of .80. In plain language, the SAT is two parts a measure of general intelligence and one part a measure of specific scholastic reasoning skills and abilities.
If Bush could score in the top 16 percent of college applicants on the SAT, he would almost certainly rank higher on tests of general intelligence, which are normed with reference to the general population. But even if his rank remained constant at the 84th-percentile level of his SAT score, it would translate to an IQ score of 115.
It's tempting to employ Al Gore's IQ😕AT ratio of 134:1355 as a formula for estimating Bush's probable intelligence quotient — an exercise in fuzzy statistics that predicts a score of 119. If the number sounds familiar, it's precisely the IQ score attributed to Kennedy, whom Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein, in "The Presidential Difference," commended as "a quick study, whose wit was an indication of a subtle mind."
As a final clue to Bush's cognitive capacity, consider data from Joseph Matarazzo's leading text on intelligence and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth: The average IQ is about 105 for high school graduates, 115 for college graduates and 125 for people with advanced professional degrees. With his MBA from Harvard Business School, it's not unreasonable to assume that Bush's IQ surpasses the 115 of the average bachelor's-degree-only college graduate.
George W. Bush has often been underestimated. Almost certainly, he's received a bad rap on the count of cognitive capacity. Indications are that, in the arena of mental ability, Bush is in the same league as John F. Kennedy, who graduated 65th in his high-school class of 110 and, in the words of one biographer, "stumbled through Latin, French, mathematics, and English but made respectable marks in physics and history."
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Originally posted by zeeblebotYou can defend Bush all you want, but he left America in far worse shape than when he took over. Regardless what his grades in school were, he was a lousy President. George W Bush enjoyed using the Holy Bible as a political tool, which I'm sure made a favorable impression on you, but he was STILL a lousy President!😏
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/benedetto/2005-06-10-benedetto_x.htm
Posted 6/10/2005 5:28 PM
Who is smarter, Kerry or Bush?
Richard Benedetto
"When Bush's grades were first made public in 1999, he was then the Texas governor and Republican front-runner for the 2000 presidential nomination. Vice President Al Gore was his likely D ...[text shortened]... t the time, Yale considered grades between 70 and 79 a C and 60 to 69 a D.
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