High IQ society
A high IQ society is an organization that limits its membership to people who have attained a specified score on an IQ test. The largest and oldest such society is Mensa International, which was founded by Roland Berrill and Lancelot Ware in 1946.[1]
Entry requirements
High IQ societies typically accept a variety of IQ tests for membership eligibility; these include WAIS, Stanford-Binet, and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, amongst many others deemed to sufficiently measure or correlate with intelligence. Tests deemed to insufficiently correlate with intelligence (e.g. post-1994 SAT, in the case of Mensa and Intertel) are not accepted for admission.[2][3][4] As IQ significantly above 146 SD15 (approximately three-sigma) cannot be reliably measured with accuracy due to sub-test limitations and insufficient norming, IQ societies with cutoffs significantly higher than four-sigma should be considered dubious.[5][6][7]
Societies
Some societies accept the results of standardized tests taken elsewhere. Those are listed below by selectivity percentile (assuming the now-standard definition of IQ as a standard score with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 IQ points). Notable high IQ societies include:
| Name | Established | No. of members | Approx. no. of countries | Fees | Eligibility | Approx. IQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intertel | 1966 | 1,300–1,400 (as of January 2014) | 31 | Annual dues are $39 | Top 1 percent (99th percentile; 1 out of 100) | 135 |
| Mega Society | 1982 | 26 (as of January 2014) | Unknown | Annual dues are $39 | Top 0.0001 percent (99.9999th percentile; 1 out of 1,000,000; not reliably measurable with current tests) | 171.3 |
| Mensa International | 1946 | ~134,000[8] (as of May 2017) | 100 | Annual dues as of November 2017 for American Mensa are $79 (dues differ by country); life membership cost varies by age | Top 2 percent of population (98th percentile; 1 person out of 50) | 131 |
| Prometheus Society | 1982 | ~120 (as of January 2014) | 13 | Annual dues are $10 | Top 0.003 percent (99.997th percentile; 1 out of 30,000; not reliably measurable with current tests) | 160 |
| Triple Nine Society | 1978 | 1,800+ (as of November 2017) | 46 | Annual dues are $10; life membership is $183 | Top 0.1 percent (99.9th percentile; 1 out of 1,000) | 146 |
References
- Percival, Matt (8 September 2008). "The Quest for Genius". Retrieved 26 June 2015.
- "Qualifying test scores". American Mensa. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
- "Intertel - Join us". www.intertel-iq.org. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
- "Test Scores". www.triplenine.org. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
- "IQ values explained". www.triplenine.org. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
- Perleth, Christoph; Schatz, Tanja; Mönks, Franz J. (2000). "Early Identification of High Ability". In Heller, Kurt A.; Mönks, Franz J.; Sternberg, Robert J.; et al. (eds.). International Handbook of Giftedness and Talent (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Pergamon. p. 301. ISBN 978-0-08-043796-5.
norm tables that provide you with such extreme values are constructed on the basis of random extrapolation and smoothing but not on the basis of empirical data of representative samples.
- Urbina, Susana (2011). "Chapter 2: Tests of Intelligence". In Sternberg, Robert J.; Kaufman, Scott Barry (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 20–38. ISBN 9780521739115. Lay summary (9 February 2012).
[Curve-fitting] is just one of the reasons to be suspicious of reported IQ scores much higher than 160
- "About Mensa International - How many members does Mensa have?". www.mensa.org. Archived from the original on 2013-09-16. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
Further reading
- Kaufman, Alan S. (2009). IQ Testing 101. New York: Springer Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8261-0629-2. Lay summary (10 August 2010).
- Shurkin, Joel (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston (MA): Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-78890-8. Lay summary (28 June 2010).
- Terman, Lewis Madison; Merrill, Maude A. (1937). Measuring intelligence: A guide to the administration of the new revised Stanford-Binet tests of intelligence. Riverside textbooks in education. Boston (MA): Houghton Mifflin.