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How people who have iq's in the low 80's function in file and in schools??Is a low 80 iq considered mental retardation???

80s is low-normal. In general, you'd be expected to be a C student, but you could graduate high school and go to technical school, get an associate's degree, or possibly (with hard work and in an area of talent) go to a four-year college. But, because IQ is closely associated with academic talent, in general someone with an IQ of 80 will look for a job in a non-academically-oriented field, and if going to school, will choose areas of talent that tend to be applied rather than theoretical, hands-on practice instead of theory.

Borderline intellectual functioning is in the 70s; that's the point at which your school would start to assume you need more help than most. In the 70s, many people need extra academic help; but in the 80s, you would probably expect to need only occasional extra tutoring for particularly difficult subjects. The exception to that would be if there was a specific learning disability involved, like dyslexia, for example; anyone needs extra help if they have one of those.

An IQ in the low 80s is not mental retardation. You aren't considered MR unless you test at 70 or lower and have difficulty learning adaptive skills. And even then, with mild MR in the 50s and 60s, it is pretty hard to tell just talking to somebody that they have it. People in the 50s and 60s can generally graduate from high school and learn enough to live independently and support themselves, unless there is some other issue involved that holds them back from it.

But I'm talking here about people who score low on IQ tests, but don't have any other quirks about their brains. Autistic people who score low on IQ tests are a completely different thing in many cases because there can be problems interpreting the information and communicating with the tester, as well as unusually low skills "blocking" other skills when accommodation is not provided, or even skills that are unreliable and cannot be depended upon to be accessible upon demand. When you are autistic and measure low on an IQ test, it means quite a lot less than a typical person with a low score. Such cases have to be taken individually, since the particular strengths of that person can be of a sort that would be quite unexpected of a person whose skills were more easily predictable by just his IQ score.

So, some say borderline stops at 80, some say it stops at 85... doesn't make much difference.

A difference of five points is probably smaller than the difference between how you test on a good day and a bad day, anyway. It doesn't seem very significant to me, really.

Hiya here in the UK the cut off point between 'low function' (I hate that term) and 'high function' (hate that too!) is 70

SO basically it means a child with an IQ of LESS than 70 will immediately be offered a 'special school' placement whereas a child with 70 or above will automatically be placed in mainstream education ...simple as