Reply To: “I’m A Mensan Now”
I used to play in Scrabble tournaments as a teenager, I went along with my mum (who is good at Scrabble because she can’t spell, and many incorrectly-spelled common words have secret identities as correctly-spelled obscure words.) I won quite a few prizes for being best in the bottom grade. 😀 It doesn’t pay to be too good at it. Strangely enough though, when I took that Mensa sample test you linked to earlier (while I should have been working, but it’s December) the two questions I couldn’t figure out were the anagram ones. Although I reckon I answered one of them correctly… the question was something like ‘can you unscramble this word?’ and I answered ‘no’. I guess they’re measuring smartness rather than smart-assiness.
I wonder whether they should control for things like Asperger’s, where somebody is better at doing tests but might not be proportionately more intelligent than others. I guess it’s pretty much impossible to design a test which tests anything other than how good the person is at taking that test, though. I hope this doesn’t come off as being anti-autism or anything, it’s not that I don’t think such people should be in Mensa or that I don’t think they’re smart, just that if there is something (such as extreme concentration on small details, which I think I read is a common autistic trait) that makes them better at tests without necessarily being more intelligent, it would kind of skew the results. But the results are hopelessly skewed anyway, so meh.
ETA: I just remembered that long ago when I was still in NZ, I signed up to be notified of Mensa testing dates, because a friend had joined and he had a chance of winning something if he encouraged other people to join. The tests were always at inconvenient times and places, so I never went to one, but I remember that they completely misheard my name (and apparently also my hopefully-feminine voice) on their answering machine, and addressed a letter to Andrew Labrett. Or maybe that was some other society.