What is I. Q.?

Intelligence testing provides a standardized means of placing children in the proper grades in school. The pioneer intelligence test is the Stanford-Binet, which attempts to assign a score of 100 to an "average" intelligence. There are a number of Stanford-Binet tests for different ages, even for infants. There are other intelligence tests such as the California Mental Maturity, which do not have the same grading scale and scores do not have the same meaning as for the Stanford-Binet. The central idea behind intelligence tests is that they are designed to measure mental agility independently of education, so a high "I. Q." does not mean that a person is well educated. Except for Marilyn Vos Savant and the Mensa Society, discussed below, and clones of the Mensa Society, I. Q. has no meaning whatever for adults.

The Mensa Society

For ten years I attended meetings of the Mensa Society in a large US city. The only requirement for joining Mensa is scoring in the 98th percentile in one of the standard intelligence tests. Since different tests do not have comparable scores, using a percentile ranking permits a standard result. The 98th percentile means that you score better than 98% of the people who take the test. My purpose in joining was to get news of a brilliant high school friend that I had fallen out of touch with. I had heard that he had died. I suspected suicide since he had spoken of it and I wanted to know. I thought that he might have been a member of Mensa, or at least that these were the kind of people who would take note of him and could appreciate him. Eventually I did meet someone who knew him. He had become known in the coffee house circuit and my contact spoke in praise of his fanciful and entertaining schemes and his poetry.

I also met some of the people. They were all "bright" in the sense that they understood things quickly, but in general they were not well educated, especially benevolent, or even especially sane. Sometimes education was amazingly deficient. I met a charming girl who had never learned to multiply. She carried a slide rule with which to calculate tax and tips. Some did have mathematical skills. One man had memorized a table of logarithms so as to do calculations more quickly in his head. A number had special skills of a parlor trick variety. They did not represent a true sample of people with high IQ's, for according to a Mensa Bulletin survey many new members would attend a few meetings and drop out because they didn't like the people. One such person was biochemist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who offered the parting remark that "An intelligence test is merely a test of those skills associated with intelligence by the person making up the test." Much to his surprise this observation was well received by the society. Many members were underachievers who held onto their high test scores and Mensa membership as a much needed ego boost. I urge you to believe that such people are more to be pitied than scorned.

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