Some people who take the Mensa test really, really want to belong. Others want self-satisfaction. And others just want to find kindred souls who get their jokes.
By KELLEY BENHAM
Published October 23, 2003
TAMPA - In high school, David was one of those "performing below ability" kids. He was smart but feared geekdom.
Now he's grown, successful. A process engineer and IT consultant. And here he is at the University of Tampa on a Saturday morning - desk cleared, No. 2 pencils sharpened - surreptitiously taking the Mensa admission test.
He does not want his co-workers to know about this. So we're withholding his name the way we do for rape victims and underage criminals. If he passes and his co-workers find out, he'll be tormented at work. If he flunks . . . you see his point.
Across the room is Jackie Campos, who frustrated her classmates even in kindergarten by reading while they plodded through the alphabet. Now she reads 1,500 words a minute - a fat novel in a couple of hours. She tests herself at home with crossword puzzles and Internet IQ tests.
She gets a lot of blond jokes at work. This ought to put a stop to that.
Ten people, for whatever reason, are spending a couple of hours making clear, dark marks on bubble sheets, trying to see if they're smarter than 98 percent of the population, smart enough to be in a club that exists for no other purpose than to bring big brains together.
Asked to explain on a Mensa survey why they would do such a thing, most of them chose "Validate my intelligence" or "Curious about my intelligence."
No one chose "To win a bet."
One quiet guy sums it up like this: "After college," he says sadly, "there are no more tests."
The test proctor is, by day, a curmudgeonly high school teacher, the "meanest, nastiest, evilest," at Alonso High. Joe Joeb joined Mensa on something like a bet. A guy at work was bragging about how smart he was, so they dueled with standardized score sheets. Joeb got in; the other guy didn't. Joeb stayed because, among other reasons, the Mensans get his jokes.
"The instructions may seem a little patronizing," he tells the candidates, and Round 1 begins.
They divide fractions: Is it multiply the numerators and divide by the denominators, or invert the denominator fraction and multiply? Middle school was such a long time ago, and the clock is ticking.
They choose antonyms and synonyms. They dissect geometric shapes so the parts rearranged can create other shapes. The 12 allotted minutes slide by. Careful deliberation deteriorates into frenzied guessing. It's okay, Joeb tells them, almost no one finishes.
Their confidence is rattled. They compare insecurities. The conversation makes sense only if you suffered with them:
"How many feet of wire could you buy?"
"What if most businessmen are Republicans?"
Jackie seems secure. David is troubled; he left a few answers blank.
"It's a defect," he says. "I can't leave unfinished business, and it hurts me."
Round 2, the questions are not like the SAT or the GRE or any other standardized test they have seen. This test has crude little illustrations: a tree, a mountain range, a brick wall, a lawn mower. Choose the drawing that represents the opposite of the first picture. There are branches, leaves, picket fences, whales, sea horses. What is the opposite of a tree? It is unsettling.
Up front, the proctors are trying to answer the questions for fun. They are stumped on the meaning of "propinquity" (proximity; nearness; kinship).
Most of the proctors are teachers, but Mensa claims all kinds: barbers, postal workers, taxi drivers and yes, rocket scientists. There's a "real, live practicing Wiccan" and a guy who takes pigeons to the beach in his car, Joeb says.
Members form cliques, pretty much like in high school, and join interest groups on astronomy, UFOs, coin collecting, cooking, haiku, chocolate, philosophy and anything else they can think of. Being Mensans, they can think of lots of stuff.
"Some of our social groups are given over to wild drinking and so forth," Joeb says. "At least if you act foolish, people know it isn't because you're stupid."
There are 50,000 members in the United States, more than 500 in the Tampa Bay area. They have nothing in common but a test score. And although playful Mensans will jokingly shout Retest! Retest! at each other, once you're in, you're in for good.
Lisa Simpson, the yellow-skinned animated sister of Bart, is said to be the youngest member of Springfield Mensa. The Blue Power Ranger is a member, although whether he lists it on his resume is unclear.
Some Mensans are members of an even more elite club called Intertel, and the freakishly bright are "Triple Niners": in the top one-tenth of 1 percent. One homeless Mensan is a Triple Niner, they say.
But it is bad form to compare IQ scores.
"That's a big no-no in Mensa," Joeb says.
"If you made the top 2 percent, nothing else matters," says proctor Yvonne Meadows.
"Of course," says Joeb, but only because he is among friends, "some of us made the top 1 percent."
After the test-takers turn in their score sheets, most of them flee. They won't get their scores for weeks. They'll try not to think about it in the meantime.
Tom Zuazo already has abandoned his dream of adding Mensa to his resume. He thought it would go nicely there, to balance his not-quite-3.0 college grade point average.
He's smart but a procrastinator, a chronic underachiever, a B student nearing graduation.
The time limit wrecked his thinking. The little pictures were puzzling, he says. "They did not seem like opposites to me."
Joeb understands kids like him. In high school he flunked senior year because homework was against his principles. He sees lots of kids smart enough to ace tests without developing work habits, kids almost incapable of showing work on the FCAT because the answers come to them so easily. He sponsored a Procrastinators Club at his school, recruiting members after deadlines for other clubs had passed.
If it's hard for bright kids to find a place to fit in in high school, it's also hard in the real world, where there is no National Honor Society and extra credit is hard to come by.
Lots of people who pass the Mensa test never show up at a meeting. They just want to prove something to themselves, or to some arrogant jerk at the office.
But Jackie Campos really wants in. She wants to go to the convention in Las Vegas, meet other people like herself. She admits it: She has her hopes up.
David screwed up one of the early problems and couldn't recover. He made it through only two sections without guessing. He never could do timed tests; he even had to do remedial work in college because he was so bad at them.
Even if he passes, he'll keep it to himself. He learned his lesson the day someone brought an IQ test to the office and David got the highest score. They have never let him forget it.
"I caught a lot of crap," he says.
He's more likely to tell people he took the test if he flunks it.
Even the proctors don't put Mensa on their resume. It can intimidate employers and seem arrogant. And they say membership is not about ego-stroking, anyway.
It's just a way to find people who understand them. Lots of people meet and marry in the group, but most of them just want to find people they can talk to.
The proctors have shared the awkwardness of posing a riddle to the uninterested or using a pun in the wrong crowd.
"You are a pigment of my imagination," they might say, and inevitably someone will correct them.
You mean figment.
No, I mean pigment.
Joeb has found people who, though they may not appreciate his jokes, at least understand them.
"I have one," he says, as they sort and pack the test booklets. "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
(We'll pause while you prepare your answer.)
"Wouldn't you if all those Russians were bearing down on you?"
The Mensans are silent.
"Oh, chicken?" Joeb says. "I meant Chechen."
The Mensans laugh.
Mensa Mini-Quiz
These questions from Mensan Abbie F. Salny are similar to those administered on the Mensa Admission Test.
1. What number is 200 times one-fourth of one-half of 32?
2. The clothing store is going out of business. A dozen pairs of men's socks are selling for half a dozen dollars. How much is a pair of socks?
3. Roy is very fond of his father's only brother's only son's only first cousin. Who is he?
4. What four-letter word inserted in the blank below will create two new words from those on either side? Second ____ Print (Hyphenated words are allowed.)
5. Reduce the high-flown language below to a simple adage.
Individuals of the genus Homo sapiens whose customary habitat is composed of vitreous materials should refrain from and are cautioned against hurling ossiferous objects.
6. Today is Friday. What day falls two days before the day after the day before tomorrow?
7. A patron of the diner called the waitress over and complained that there was a used match in his coffee. The waitress took the cup away and returned forthwith, saying, "Here's a fresh cup." The man tasted the coffee, slammed his fist on the table and declared: "All you did was take out the match!" How did he know?
8. Wayne is training for next week's cross-country ski competition. How long will it take him to ski 4 miles uphill at 2 mph and 4 miles downhill at 8 mph?
9. The young assistant excitedly told the archaeologist that he had just made a historic discovery: a coin marked 99 B.C. He was promptly fired. Why?
10. Counting from zero, what is the first number that contains the letter "a"?
11. What is the 11-letter word that all smart people spell incorrectly?
Answers
1. 800
2. 50 cents
3. Roy himself
4. Hand.
5. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
6. Thursday
7. He had put sugar in the coffee before discovering the match.
8. 2.5 hours
9. There are no coins marked "B.C."
10. One thousand
11. Incorrectly
Scoring: Count the number of correct answers
9-11 Mensa material. Try to join.
7-8 Good chance you qualify for Mensa.
5-6 Not bad. You might make Mensa.
Below 5 You must have had a bad day. Try again.
As if you didn't know
Mensa is open to anyone who scores in the top 2 percent on any of a number of standardized tests that measure intelligence, including ordinary intelligence tests e.g., Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, Cattell and such tests as the SAT, the GRE and the armed services' GCT. For information on joining, call (817) 607-0060 or go to www.us.mensa.org
