High IQ society

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A high IQ society is an organization that limits its membership to people who are within a certain high percentile of Intelligence quotient (IQ) test results. The oldest, largest and best-known such society is Mensa International,^[1] which was founded by Roland Berrill and Dr. Lancelot Ware in 1946. Other early societies are Intertel, founded by Ralph Haines in 1966; the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, founded by Dr. Christopher Harding in 1974; Prometheus Society, Mega Society, Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society, founded by Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin.

Entry requirements

High IQ societies typically accept a variety of standardized intelligence tests.

The ceiling of most standardized (validated and normed) intelligence tests is at around the 99.9th percentile. Measurements above this level need—for a credible result—a calculation, extrapolation and interpretation (including observations during the tests and sub-tests) by psychometricians experienced in high IQ testing, and at least two differently designed standardized tests (among these at least one supervised) should be performed. Measurements above 99.9th percentile are dubious as there are insufficient normative cases upon which to base a statistically justified rank-ordering.^[2] In 2010, the U.S. population's normal expectation for the number of persons with IQ over 175 (sd15) is about 90 persons.

Some societies

The entrance criteria for IQ societies varies considerably across both the kinds of tests accepted (i.e., whether the tests are either numerically, spatially, verbally, etc. slanted and are proctored or not) and how high one must score in order to acquire membership.

Some notable examples, which include widely known ones, like Mensa, that will accept the results of standardized tests taken elsewhere, are listed by percentile (assuming IQ is normally distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 IQ points):

• Top 2% (98th percentile; 1/50; IQ 131 sd15 / 133 sd16; +2σ):
  • Mensa International
• Top 1% (99th percentile; 1/100; IQ 135 sd15 / 137 sd16):
  • Intertel
• Top 0.1% (99.9th percentile; 1/1,000; IQ 146 sd15 / 149 sd16):
  • International Society for Philosophical Enquiry
  • One-in-a-Thousand Society
  • Triple Nine Society
• Top 0.003% (99.997th percentile; 1/30,000; IQ 160 sd15 / 164 sd16):
  • Prometheus Society
• Top 0.0001% (99.9999th percentile; 1/1,000,000; IQ 172 sd15 / 176 sd16):
  • Mega Society

See also

• Intelligence Quotient
• Levels of Measurement: Ordinal Scale
• The Mismeasure of Man
• Psychometrics

References

1. ^ Percival, Matt (2006-09-08). "The Quest for Genius". CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/09/08/quest.genius/. Retrieved 2008-11-29. 
2. ^ 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.. 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." 

Further reading

• 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. 
• Shurkin, Joel (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston (MA): Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0316788908. Lay summary (28 June 2010). 
• Stanovich, Keith (2009). What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12385-2. Lay summary (9 August 2010). 
• Kaufman, Alan S. (2009). IQ Testing 101. New York: Springer Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8261-0629-2. Lay summary (10 August 2010). 

External links

• Darryl Miyaguchi. "A Short (and Bloody) History of the High I.Q. Societies". http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html. 
• I. Ivec. "Extreme High IQ Societies". http://www.ultimaiq.net/.