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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

This is a tragedy of course but I always wonder when journalists repeat things like this:

"Then she used her 173 IQ to pass California's high school-equivalency exam. At 19, she graduated from California State University at Fresno and took the CPA exam (scoring second best in the country that year). "

While it would be possible to verify that someone graduated from CSU at 19 (you call them) in general I would imagine that there is no easy way to verify someone's IQ or that they were 2nd best in the country at the CPA exam. I would imagine that journalists repeat things like this blindly and they become the truth about people when stated as if fact.

Of course journalists are generally going to repeat things that they are told but certain things are much harder to verify by any third party reading (as opposed to "graduated from Harvard" which could be disproved by anyone).

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They actually do keep track of the top scores in the country on the CPA Exam. They've been doing it since 1924. Up until 2004 an "Elijah Watt Sells" award was given out to the top three scorers in the country. Nowadays they'll recognize a whole bunch of people in no particular order, but back in the day they used to give out a gold, silver, and bronze award for the top three scores. You can view a full list of winners here.

http://www.aicpa.org/BecomeACPA/CPAExam/ExamOverview/Downloa...

If you look at the winners from 1982 (exactly 31 years ago) someone named Joy Dianne Catalano from California had the second best score in the country. So looks like that claim is legitimate.

source: I ran a CPA Exam startup and know wayyy more than anyone ever should about the CPA exam

You're right that there's a lot of mythology about IQ, but presumably a person could show documentation of such a thing - e.g. a score on a "real" IQ test administered by a professional qualified in psychometrics[1].

Same thing with a CPA exam - presumably, the professional organization keeps records of scores for some years and it would probably be possible to pull their file. (Similar to how you can contact a university registrar's office to verify a person's claim to a degree.)

Keep in mind, I'm not saying that the journalist actually did their fact-checking to this level of persistence - just that they could.

[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Modern_t...

For someone of that age (I am a little bit older), the test administered in childhood almost certainly would have been a Stanford-Binet L-M test, which was already obsolete by the time I took it. That test did have scores that went up to the low 180s, but those are not comparable to scores on current IQ tests. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification

(a Wikipedia article with more current and more authoritative references than the other Wikipedia article already kindly shared here) for more details.

The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) awards the top performers of the Uniform CPA Exam each year, and has since 1923 when the Elijah Watt Sells Award was established. The criteria for winning has changed over the years, but last year, for example, the top 39 of the 92,000 candidates received the award. It should be easy to verify this.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah_Watt_Sells#Award

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