The Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level or more on a particular test of general intelligence, called the Mega Test, claimed to be able to discriminate at that level.[2] It was founded in 1982 by Ronald K. Hoeflin to facilitate psychometric research.[3]
 | |
| Formation | 1982 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Ronald K. Hoeflin |
| Type | High IQ society |
Membership | 26[1] |
Official language | English |
Administrator | Brian Wiksell |
| Website | www |
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 IQ tests that the test author[who?] claims have been normalized using standard statistical methods. There is controversy about whether these tests have been properly validated.[5] The Mega test specifically is described as a "nonstandardized test" by a psychologist who wrote a 2012 book on the history of IQ testing.[6]
The Guinness Book of World Records once stated that the most elite ultra High IQ Society is the Mega Society with percentiles of 99.9999 or one in a million required for admission.[7]
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]
