I can still hear the reproachful refrain from my dearly departed mother as if it were yesterday. "You’re not as smart as you think you are, young man," she would say when trying to convey a lesson to me about some errant behavior. It turns out she was wrong, as you’ll soon see.
Thanks to an assignment dare from one of this magazine’s editors, I took the Mensa High IQ Society Admission Test this past fall at the Louisville Free Public Library. When first approached about the project, I was asked whether I thought a quantification of my mental abilities for the purposes of joining some club was "cheesy." I replied that how I felt about it would dep/files/storyimages/on how I did on the test. I am now ready to pronounce that, no, it is not cheesy at all. Although Mensa no longer issues a report on candidates’ IQ scores, the organization has acknowledged that I am qualified, being in the top 2 percent intellectually of Americans, to be a member. (For those of you not Mensa members 2 percent means one in every 50.)
If you check out the American Mensa website (www.us.mensa.org), do not be surprised to find that it is missing the obligatory link to "FAQs." I guess Mensa figures that anyone interested in membership should already know it all. A quote from the club notes that members may avail themselves of Mensa special-interest units that range from "astronomy to chocolate." (It’s a bit disappointing that a gathering of people this smart could only manage a list that went three letters into the alphabet.)
The October test, conducted during one of Mensa’s membership drives, was held on a cool morning, but the forecast indicated that temperatures were headed for the mid-60s. I was smart enough to dress in layers, which was obviously a harbinger of eventual success on the test. Nine of us showed up at the downtown library to assay our mental acuity. Among those in attendance were a hedge-fund researcher, a high school teacher, two college students, a mortgage loan sales rep and a doctor studying in Louisville under the auspices of a surgical fellowship.
My testmates were diverse in appearance and resume, but not especially in their motivations. Most were merely curious as to whether or not they would qualify. During the exam I was struck by the absence of leg-shaking, pencil-tapping, facial tics and other overt signs of nervousness among my colleagues. After discovering that this was perceived as a personal challenge for them as individuals and not as something to further their careers or education, the lack of visible anxiety made more sense.
My favorite reason for attendance that day was offered by Mike, a college student. He told me he had never seen the mezzanine level of the library. (When I later asked him what he thought of it, he replied, "It was awesome!")
We faced two tests that day. The Admissions Test is broken into seven parts timed over a total of 35 minutes and is also known as the California Test of Mental Maturity (a measurement I figured was sure to doom my chances). The second exam is the Wonderlic, an audition often used by personnel offices, posing 50 questions to be answered in 12 minutes. A sufficient score on either of the two will do for meeting membership criteria.
I haven’t taken a test that required more than pro-viding bodily fluids for at least two decades, but the actual inquisitional experience was not much different from that which we have all experienced and remember from as far back as junior high. A few question booklets; bubble answer sheets; sharpened #2 pencils; and instructions from the proctors to "fill in the box entirely and make sure all erasures are complete" are still the rules of thumb. The test questions I liked the most were reminiscent of riddles and I made a decision to attack them in earnest and forgo the few math questions that had drawings of triangles with x’s and y’s in their corners. In retrospect, I think I passed by answering the "fun" questions and avoiding those geared toward people comfortable with the more mundane knowledge necessary to build skyscrapers and conquer outer space.
So look out, Mensa, here I come. Notwithstanding Groucho’s famous remark regarding eschewing membership in any club that would accept him as a member, I have decided to join Mensa — even if only to prove how wrong a group of geniuses can be.