A high-IQ society is an organization that limits its membership to people who have attained a specified score on an
IQ test, usually in the top two percent of the population (98th percentile) or above. These may also be referred to as genius societies. The largest and oldest such society is
Mensa International
Mensa is the largest and oldest high-IQ society in the world. It is a non-profit organisation open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardised, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test. Mensa formally compr ...
, which was founded by
Roland Berrill
Roland Fabien Berrill (1897–1962) was a British-Australian who was the co-founder (with the English barrister Lancelot Ware) of Mensa, the international society for intellectually gifted people.
The founding of Mensa
Mensa was founded by Be ...
and
Lancelot Ware
Lancelot Lionel Ware OBE (5 June 191515 August 2000) was an English barrister and biochemist. He co-founded Mensa, the international society for intellectually gifted people, with the Australian barrister Roland Berrill in 1946. It was ori ...
in 1946.
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
Intertel (previously the International Legion of Intelligence) is a high-IQ society founded in 1966, that is open to those who have scored at or above the 99th percentile (top 1%) on one of various standardized tests of intelligence. It has been ...
) are not accepted for admission. 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.
Societies
Some societies accept the results of
standardized test
A standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions and interpretations are consistent and are administered and scored in a predete ...
s 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
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while ...
of 15 IQ points). Since the 1960s, Mensa has experienced increasing competition in attracting high-IQ individuals, as various new groups have emerged with even stricter and more exclusive admissions requirements.
Notable high-IQ societies include:
See also
*
IQ classification
IQ classification is the practice by Intelligence quotient (IQ) test publishers of labeling IQ score ranges with category names such as "superior" or "average".
The current scoring method for all IQ tests is the "deviation IQ". In this method, ...
*
References
Further reading
*
*
**
*
{{High IQ