Mega Society
High IQ society | |
Membership | 26[1] |
---|---|
Official language | English |
Administrator | Brian Wiksell |
Website | www |
The Mega Society is a
The public profile of the Mega Society increased with the publication of the Mega Test in 1985 by Hoeflin.[4]
Criteria for acceptance
The Mega Society accepts members on the basis of untimed, unsupervised
Publications
The society's journal, called Noesis since July 1987, has been published since January 1982, when it was called the Circle. Currently, the journal is published on an irregular basis.[8]
Criticism
No professionally designed and validated IQ test claims to distinguish test-takers at the one-in-a-million level of rarity of score. The standard score range of the Stanford–Binet IQ test is 40 to 160.[9] The standard scores on most other currently normed IQ tests fall in the same range. A score of 160 corresponds to a rarity of about 1 person in 31,560 (leaving aside the issue of error of measurement common to all IQ tests), which falls short of the Mega Society's 1 in a million requirement.[10] IQ scores above this level have been criticized as being dubious as there are insufficient normative cases upon which to base a statistically justified rank-ordering.[11][12] Very high or very low IQ scores are less reliable than IQ scores nearer to the population median.[13]
References
- ^ Mega Society. "The Mega Society". Retrieved 10 August 2023.
- ^ Mega Society (August 2005). "Constitution of the Mega Society". Retrieved 2006-07-25.
- The Washington Post Magazine. pp. 14, 23.
vos Savant, Marilyn Mach (1985). Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest. McGraw-Hill. pp. 31–36.ISBN 0-07-039377-X.
Aviv, Rachel (August 2, 2006). "The Intelligencer". The Village Voice. Archived from the original on 2007-02-11. Retrieved 2006-09-23.
Fella, Answer (March 1, 2006). "World's Smartest Fella".Esquire. Retrieved 2006-10-29.
Cox, Jack (June 21, 2005). "Smarter than 99.9% of the rest of us". The Denver Post. Retrieved 2006-10-29.
Derfner, Larry (August 8, 2003). "It smarts!". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 2006-10-29. - ^ Morris, Scot (April 1985). "World's Most Difficult IQ Test". Omni. pp. 128–132.
Graham, Ellen (April 9, 1992). "For Minds of Mega, the Mensa Test, is a Real No-Brainer". The Wall Street Journal subs. req. p. A1. Retrieved 2006-07-26. (also archived at [1])
Berliner, Uri (December 28, 1992). "Mega smart is very, VERY smart, indeed". The San Diego Union-Tribune subs. req. p. C1.
Simonton, Dean Keith (1994). Greatness: Who makes History and Why. Guilford Press. pp. 225. ]
Lawrence A Pervin; Oliver P John, eds. (1999). Handbook of Personality. Guilford Press. p. 632. ]
Jacobs, A. J. (2004). The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Man in the World. Simon & Schuster. pp. 243. ] - )
From the article: "Although the approach that Hoeflin takes is interesting, inventive, intellectually stimulating, and internally consistent, it violates many good psychometric principles by overinterpreting the weak data of a self-selected sample."
- ISBN 978-1-4408-0338-3. Retrieved 31 August 2013.
And what is that makes Marilyn vos Savant so uniquely qualified to answer such questions? There is only one reason: she is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest IQ ever recorded. Never mind that this record is based on a nonstandardized test put out by an obscure group known as Mega, supposedly the world's most selective organization of geniuses. Ignore the fact that test scores at the extreme ends of any distribution are notoriously unreliable.
- ISBN 0-85112-433-X.
- ^ "The Mega Society". Retrieved 16 May 2011.
- ^ Roid, Gale H. (2006). "Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales (SB5), Fifth Edition". The Riverside Publishing Company. Retrieved 2006-07-25.
- ISBN 978-0-521-70781-7.
- 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.
- ISBN 9780521739115.
[Curve-fitting] is just one of the reasons to be suspicious of reported IQ scores much higher than 160
- ISBN 978-1-931280-17-4.
The concerns associated with SEMs [standard errors of measurement] are actually substantially worse for scores at the extremes of the distribution, especially when scores approach the maximum possible on a test ... when students answer most of the items correctly. In these cases, errors of measurement for scale scores will increase substantially at the extremes of the distribution. Commonly the SEM is from two to four times larger for very high scores than for scores near the mean (Lord, 1980).