Question
What is Mensa?
Short answer
Mensa is a society for people who score in the top 2% on a supervised, approved intelligence test. It was founded in England on October 1, 1946, by Roland Berrill and Lance Ware, and Mensa International says it has around 170,000 members. Membership depends only on the qualifying score.
Want your own number? The test is 25 visual puzzles, about 12 minutes, no sign-up.
How Mensa started
Mensa was founded on October 1, 1946, by Lance Ware and Roland Berrill (Mensa International: history). The two met as strangers on a train in Surrey, England; Ware was a 30-year-old law student at Oxford, and Berrill a 45-year-old born in Australia. Before they founded the club, Ware gave Berrill the Cattell intelligence test, and Berrill scored in the top 1% (Mensa International: history). Mensa stayed an essentially British club until an American branch was set up in the fall of 1960 (Mensa International: history).
Try one · Pattern Recognition
Which tile comes next?
Tap the option you think is right, or show the answer.
Show the answer
The missing tile shows a tiny outlined star (option 2).
How to solve it
- Compare neighboring tiles and name what changes each time.
- From tile to tile, the star gets smaller.
- The fill cycles outline, hatched and solid, then starts again.
- Everything else stays the same from tile to tile.
- The last tile shows a small solid star. Apply each change once more.
- So the missing tile shows a tiny outlined star.
That was 1 puzzle. The full test has 25.
Who can join
To join you must score in the upper 2% of the general population on a Mensa-approved test that was properly administered and supervised (Mensa International). There are two routes:
- Take Mensa's own test. American Mensa's admission test takes one to two hours and is for ages 14 and up; you can take a test or battery once every eight weeks (American Mensa: testing). British Mensa's supervised test lasts 2 1/4 hours and costs 49 pounds (British Mensa: test your IQ).
- Submit prior evidence. American Mensa accepts scores from about 200 standardized intelligence tests, including 130 on the Stanford-Binet 5, a Wechsler Full Scale IQ of 130 and 148 on the Cattell (American Mensa: qualifying scores).
The different numbers are the same cutoff on different scales: the 98th percentile is about 131 on a standard deviation 15 scale, about 133 on SD 16 and about 149 on SD 24. See the top 2 percent.
What Mensa does not accept
American Mensa does not accept unsupervised testing, including electronic or internet-based tests, and does not accept the ASVAB (American Mensa: qualifying scores). British Mensa runs its own remotely proctored online test, made of a nonverbal reasoning test and a vocabulary test (British Mensa: online IQ test). An ordinary online IQ test, including ours, cannot be used for admission.
Related
For the test itself, read the Mensa admission test; for the score, what IQ you need for Mensa; and to warm up, the Mensa-style practice test.
Sources
- Mensa International. History of Mensa. www.mensa.org/mensa/history
- Mensa International. Home page (membership and eligibility). www.mensa.org/
- American Mensa. Admission testing. www.us.mensa.org/join/testing/
- American Mensa. Qualifying test scores. www.us.mensa.org/join/testscores/qualifying-test-scores/
- British Mensa. Test your IQ / book a test. mensa.org.uk/test-your-iq/
- British Mensa. Mensa online IQ test. mensa.org.uk/mensa-online-iq-test/