Aspergers and MENSA

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When I was about 13 my class at school did a mensa test as part of a maths lesson about averages and percentages. I don't remember my score but I came top but the teacher said only 1 in 16,000 has a score that high so I must have cheated. I didn't cheat but I didn't deny it either. I've always wanted to do the test for real but the thought of failing scares me.

Densa was always my pub quiz team name.

Of course, you cheated. Because that's the only way anybody can ever get good at puzzles.

I think if I wanted to, I could probably practice for the IQ test and ceiling out all the subtests. IQ tests are utter bunk.

I'm not a member of MENSA, or any other high IQ society. I've never taken an IQ test, but I doubt I'd be MENSA material - this being precisely the reason why I don't want to take such a test.

I tried to take their online test, but I couldn't finish it, because it was too boring. IQ tests are so boring. Especially the verbal and math portions.

Wrong Planet is an organization of autistic people who, some of which, are nevertheless dumb enough to believe that every Mensa member believes that the manifold diversities of human intelligence can be adequately represented by a short number. I doubt mensans would approve.

I'd like to see you practice for...


the TITAN test.

There is no IQ requirement for that, but it certainly mean mostly peoples with high IQ.


That would be cheating.
They not complete bunk though. Beside be very bad when it come to test autistic peoples, (Except maybe the Raven) they rarely give false positives for a diagnostism of giftedness. (Except for when there is "cheating".)
There is a lot of things that can bring a false negative though, (Depression, sleep deprivation,...) and thus also a false positive for mental retardation.

I was a member of Mensa when I was younger but never participated.

I remember not being crazy about their test. I took it around the same time I took the Wechsler Intelligence scale for Children which I preferred a great deal.

The super-elite IQ organizations are pretty ridiculous, given that a very small difference in score (though larger than the gaps between members of those organizations) can be mostly a matter of chance.

I performed an IQ test (WAIS - IV) earlier last month and finally got my overall Full Scale IQ as 139. Unfortunately I can't use these results as the IQ test was conducted by a "Provisional Psychologist", and MENSA Australia only accepts results from IQ tests which were conducted by "hardcore" (Fully Qualified) Psychologists.

With the 95% confidence interval, my lowest Full Scale IQ within that range would be around 130.

I think I can barely qualify for MENSA if I was to take their crafted exam, particularly if their second component is mostly raven's matrices.

I'm also wondering if joining MENSA is worth it, if I can qualify.

I checked the Australian MENSA website, and the events calendar for Victoria state (Melbourne city) for 2011 isn't that exciting. I already play Scrabble at a local club, I'm not interested in "Book group discussions" as I have poor reading comprehension of novels, and I can gamble Texas Hold'em poker (low stakes only) at Crown Casino.

If MENSA Australia had a special-interest group for people on the Autism Spectrum, then I'd be more interested in joining (if allowed), so I could meet more fellow HFA/Aspies.

I'll be contacting MENSA Australia and asking them about the special-interest groups that they offer. If they don't have any special-interest groups that I wanna investigate (including a group for MENSA HFA/Aspies), then I won't bother applying to do the MENSA exam.

how was it controversial? i've always wanted to get into that society to see how really smart people think, but i doubt i'll ever be able to, so i'm curious.

I was put off MENSA when I heard this story in the 90's about some members saying that mentally ill people should be killed:

http://articles.latimes.com/1995-01-10/local/me-18324_1_newsletter-editor

Made me realise that intelligent people can still be stupid.

Yes, I am

But I don't often participate.... Actually, I did not for several years...

I am very curious about how many people here are in Mensa!

For that post, I think I may prefer to respect others' ideas, although I am not agree with it at all.

I've only fairly recently turned 16, but I'm going to consider joining. I scored 26/30 on the online test (messed up the quadrilaterals, forgot that there are two 7s in 77, and couldn't rearrange the 9 letters on either question) and generally do well on tests of this sort, so I think I could do it.

No, you can't train for an IQ test.

No, IQ isn't about solving logic problems / math problems / puzzles.

Please, inform yourself about this before making such claims. It's very ignorant.

IQ tests look the way they do, because of researches showing that people who perform well on such tasks have high intelligence - it has high correlation with intelligence (it's been proven that people who perform well on working memory, spatial, pattern recognition etc. tasks also perform well on reasoning, and it has correlation with common knowledge). It would've been very stupid for scientists to claim that such figures require intelligence, without actually testing it, wouldn't it?

Please first read about IQ tests and then claim they are wrong.

Yes you can. That's why the people who give IQ tests professionally will not allow a person to take it twice inside a certain time frame. They say the second test will have "artificially elkevated results", what they call "the practice effect". That's just another way of saying that the first test was training for the second.

Outside of that, there are also cognitive exercises people can do to increase certain sub-test scores. You really can increase your working memory with brute force practice and repeatedly practicing the sort of questions they ask will truly raise your score.

I've read stacks of books about IQ tests and the history of IQ testing. The history of IQ testing is riddled with what one might call "stupid assumptions" on the part of researchers about intelligence and how to measure it. The most famous of these assumptions is the one (that they have made repeatedly in different ways) that if a person is "intelligent" they will possess a certain body of knowledge that people "should" know. This has led to tests with racial bias and culture bias. I thought all this was ancient history until I saw test questions given to my daughter. They assumed a level of social knowledge and knowledge of other children and adults that any intelligent child "should" know. But of course an autistic child doesn't spend 24/7 studying the social world around them and therefore doesn't pick up that knowledge. They study other things instead- the design on many peoples' t-shirts, in her case. This is cultural bias but the testers don't even realize it because they assume that any child with intelligence will use it to learn all they can about interrelationships and school culture.

Annoying and also comical example of culture bias
A friend of mine had a son who was language delayed (but not autistic). She took him in for testing. They wanted to see if he had a receptive language impairment too so they showed him some pictures of food and when they said the name of the food, he was supposed to point to the picture. They showed him pictures of hot dogs (we are American), cake, ice cream sundaes, all sorts of things any kid who understood language would be able to point to correctly. He just stood there "dumbly", not understanding a word. A serious expressive language delay? No. A health food zealot mom who didn't ever give him those foods so he didn't recognize any of them. They scored him down anyway because the test was standardized. It's the little things like that which let me know cultural bias is still holding strong in cognitive testing.

I joined Mensa in 1978, thinking it would be interesting to meet intelligent people. Unfortunately, it was mostly boring. I encountered more than one person who had a very inflated opinion of himself and it was really difficult to have a conversation. Back then Mensa administered two IQ tests, I was 137 on one and 142 on another.

When I was six years old, the elementary school teachers decided I was ret*d and wanted to put me in special education. Fortunately, my mother knew me better than they did and had me tested at a university. The results were that I was more intelligent than normal and was mainly bored with school and acting out because of it. Somehow they missed my Asperger's and I was around 55 years old before I found out about it.