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Mensa: Looking for the megaminds
Neil Hudson taking his Mensa test.
Membership of Mensa, one of the world’s most prestigious societies, is waning, but why? Neil Hudson sat the infamously daunting entrance exam in search of answers.
When I was told I would be taking a Mensa test, I have to say, it wasn’t something I was too worried about.
Being clever enough to pass the exam to become a member has never featured on my list of ambitions – I’ve passed lots of exams in my time, why did I need to pass another?
Besides which, there was the faint whiff of snobbery about the notion of becoming a member of an organisation which considers itself to be composed of the elite of the human population.
Perhaps that accounts in some way for its slump in membership over the last two decades – in the UK, membership has dropped from about 38,000 in 1995 to about 22,000 and in the US from 60,000 to 50,000 during the same period.
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In the 1940s, when the society was formed, Mensa, like the shady world of freemasonry, basked in its exclusivity, which was as alluring as it was elusive – it offered the chance to join a higher echelon of society, to move in hitherto closed communal circles, to gain a privileged level of social access.
But in the world of mobile phones, Facebook and Twitter, we have all the social access we need and who wants a badge saying ‘I’m more clever than you’?
Put another way, does being a member of Mensa make me a better person? Does it mean I will know what to do in a car crash? Will it help me fix my lawn mower? Or replace a plug?
Is it, in fact, irrelevant?
Right up until I walked into the test room on Sunday at the Express Holiday Inn, Leeds, that is what I thought about Mensa and then, as I waited for the clock to tick over to 2pm, the official start time of the exam, it all went out of the window.
Suddenly, I was back in school in exam conditions: the oppressive silence, the keen-eyed invigilator, the clock tick-tocking on the wall.
Suddenly I was bothered – my pulse quickened and as the test went on, I even started to sweat. So why the big change?
A quick glance around the room at my fellow candidates provided part of the answer – it was a mixed bag of men and women, some smartly dressed, others more casual, some in their teens, others over 40. These were ordinary people, with ordinary lives, with families, jobs and mortgages and nothing really to gain from joining this outwardly aloof organisation other than the prestige of knowing they could.
Testing
Perhaps that is the reason why people still join Mensa.
Mensa came about following the chance meeting of two men on a train in Oxford in 1946 – Roland Berrill, an Australian expatriate with a law licence, and Lionel Ware, a PhD working to becoming a lawyer. They got to talking about intelligence testing and the rest is history.
It exists to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity, to encourage research into the nature, characteristics and uses of intelligence and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.
Candidates pay £17.50 to take the test and a further £45 a year to become members – they gain access to various specialist clubs and, being the kind of organisation it is, it’s fair to say that if you ever do have an academic problem, you’ll know someone who can help.
But what about the test itself?
I was told to expect a two-hour exam but rather than being one long test, there were several timed sections, the first being three minutes in length.
The longest of the tests was only 18 minutes, so there was never any chance to relax or stop thinking, because one was constantly racing against the clock.
The questions were simple to begin with and included things like picking out the odd word from a list of five or choosing which set of conjoined shapes more closely matched another, but during the course of each section they became progressively harder, so that I almost always found myself struggling mentally with the penultimate question and having to guess the last one altogether.
I expected much of the test to be mathematical in nature but this proved not to be the case. A good deal of the questions are to do with the meaning of words or word puzzles, such as ‘river is to bank as sea is to...’ a) land b) forest c) shore d) island e) country.
There were others like: which of the following is least like the others? a) poem b) novel c) painting d) statue e) flower.
One question in particular had me stumped and was along the lines of: ‘A woman decided to give all her money away because someone told her she was going to die, but in the end she changed her mind and kept the money. Why?’
The list of possible answers was baffling to say the least and included options like: a) she was drunk at the time b) she realised she had a nice holiday booked c) someone told her she wasn’t going to die d) someone said she should keep the money. There seemed to be no right or wrong answer and on reflection, perhaps there wasn’t.
Before I knew it, the two hours was up.
Antimony
Test administrator Alan Staton, who took the Mensa exam several years ago, said it was something which appealed to a broad section of society.
“We get all kinds of people coming to sit the tests, at this particular test and for a variety of reasons. I used to work in a pewter factory, there were things like antimony and lead in the air and it’s supposed to affect intelligence, so I took the test.
“Mensa is Latin for table, it means all the members are equal, so once you are a member, there is no hierarchy. One of the things we do not discuss is each other’s IQ.”
Father-of-four Simon Shimbles, 46, was among those who sat the test. An oil rig worker from Keighley, he had been interested in Mensa for a while.
He said: “It was pretty much as I expected. I did the online test and scored in the top two per cent, so I thought I would try the real thing. It was almost to prove something to myself.
“I have plenty of time on my hands at work, I devour Suduko puzzles – it’s either do something constructive or waste my life on Facebook.”
Lucy Bullimore, 16, from Bardsey, Leeds, who is studying her GCSEs at Boston Spa High School, said: “I want to go to Cambridge and thought this would be a good thing to do.
“If I become a member, it would be prestigious but if I don’t, it is not going to ruin my life. It’s not something you can judge someone by.”
Former director of British Mensa Peter Bainbridge, who now works as the organisation’s northern publicity officer, became a member 15 years ago.
The 56-year-old kitchen firm boss said: “People often ask what we do at Mensa or what people get out of it. It’s a very wide-ranging, flexible social network, so you can end up speaking to people from all kinds of backgrounds from anywhere in the world.
“It’s also very egalitarian in that no-one gives a monkey’s about your background or gender. There are a lot of high-faluting ideas about what Mensa is and what it’s not – at the end of the day, it’s not unlike a colour-blind test in that it will tell you something about yourself that you did not know but it’s up to you what you do with that knowledge.”
Test results are marked and produce a percentage, from which is derived your IQ, or intelligence quotient, the benchmark being around 148.
Results normally take 10 working days – to find out what my score was, follow my twitter account: @NeilHudsonYEP
* For further information on Mensa and IQ Testing visit www.mensa.org.uk or call 01902 772 771.
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