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Is the IQ Ceiling on the Mega Test 176?
A score of 47 on the
Mega Test is equated with a deviation IQ of 190, corresponding to
an expected frequency of occurrence of 1 in 110,000,000. There
were three U. S citizens who earned scores of 47 on the Mega Test
so they would consititute the quota for 330,000,000 U. S.
citizens. A score of 46 on the Mega Test is equated with a
deviation IQ of 186, corresponding to an expected frequency of
occurrence of 1 in 30,000,000. There were three U. S citizens who
earned scores of 46 on the Mega Test. They would account for an
additional 90,000,000 U. S. citizens, for a total of 420,000,000
U. S. citizens, and with a maximum deviation IQ of 190. Since
there are only about 200,000,000 adult U. S. citizens, one
wonders if these scores might be a little high. If we back them
off one Mega-Test point, replacing a 47 with a 46, and a 46 with
a 45, we would be assuming that the Mega Test has identified the
six brightest out of 137,000,000 Americans. I don't believe that,
either. Dropping back two points reduces our quota to 37,500,000
U. S. adults, and the maximum deviation IQ to 183. And dropping
back three points brings us down to a quota of 13,500,000 adults,
and a maximum deviation IQ of 180. The last set of numbers sounds
more plausible than the preceding three. It would seem surprising
if more than a modest fraction of the smartest people in the
country heard about and took the Mega Test.
One of the interesting considerations about
the Mega Test is that two of the three people who scored 46 on
the Mega Test were women, one of whom was Marilyn vos Savant.
Considering that the standard deviation for women's IQs is of the
order of 5/6ths of the standard deviation for male IQ's, the
maximum reasonable deviation IQ for the other woman who
scored 46 on the Mega Test would be, perhaps, 173, corresponding
to 1 in 30,000,000 women. (I'm citing the other woman who scored
a 46 because, while I might justify an anomolously high score for
Marilyn vos Savant, I can't peg it that high for two women. Of
course, this is predicated upon the notion that a standard
deviation of about 13.6 is applicable to women-in-general.) To
assign a higher value to a score of 46 on the Mega Test would
seem to require that there are some women who fall completely off
the frequency distribution for women. While that's always
possible, the recent discovery that women have much less glial
tissue but larger corpus callosums suggests that there are
inherent gender differences that would render that scenario
improbable. That would seem to peg a score of 46 on the Mega Test
at an IQ of no more than 173.
It's worth noting that the analysis
conducted by the Prometheus Society's Membership Committee showed
extreme unreliability for raw scores above about 39. The Mega 27
was somewhat better, exhibiting reasonable reliability for scores
up to 24, which might represent, perhaps, an IQ-176 threshold for
the Mega Society.
A ceiling effect would seem to apply for
everyone who got a score of 43 or above. So everyone who made a
Mega 48 score of 43 or above wouldn't have been measured on the
Mega Test. All it could have provided would have been a floor
score for them.
The question arises: if a score of 46
only represents a deviation IQ of 173, what does a score of 36
portend? I don't know that it necessarily follows that a raw
score of 36 isn't consonant with a deviation IQ of 164. As
mentioned above, scores become quite unreliable above raw score
of 39, corresponding to a Mega-derived iQ of about 168. In the
Prometheus Society's Membership Committee Report, in the section
reviewing the Concept Mastery Test, the results are shown for the
Termites (IQ 137 and above), members of the Triple Nine Society
(IQ 150 and up), and Members of the Xenophon Society (IQ 160 and
up). The median raw score for the adult Termites on this test was
140. The median score for Triple-Nine members was 160. The median
score for the Xenophon members was 180, which was very close to a
perfect score of 190. This suggests that the IQs of Prometheans
are in a very rarified range, and would support the contention
that a score of 36 on the Mega Test does indeed indicate
intelligence in the 4+ sigma range.
I hold no brief for the conclusions I'm
suggesting here--only observing that they would seem to me to be
uncomfortable consequences of a reality check of the derived IQ
scores. What do you think?
