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19 August 2006

IQ test hoax?

A couple of days ago I found a website for an organization called International High IQ Society. They have two different kinds of IQ tests available, and by scoring higher than 124 in either of them you get invited to join the society of people with an intelligence quotient within the top 5th percentile of the population. I scored 129 on this test. The test if pretty fun to take, a not very long quiz thing. So I gave the web link to Stephan and Antoine too. Stephan took the test too, also scoring 129. We figured it was kinda odd that we both scored the same just like that, so we took the test a few more times. First seriously, scoring 128, then just by randomly clicking on answers without caring about the answers, scoring 95 (the supposed average of the population being between 85 and 100), and one more time deliberately getting all the answers wrong, scoring 76.
This seems very strange. I wrote them an email asking about the matter:

Hello!

I took your iq test online and I was a bit curious about a few things. The result I got was 129, and I was given the option to join the club. However, my computer glitched and turned itself off just after I had finished the test. So I took it again. Since you have a large pool of questions, enabling 2.4 billion unique tests, it shouldn't matter how many times I do the test, right? Oddly enough, I got some of the same questions as the first time. Quite the coincidence, I think. If one of the questions reappears, then sure, but three? The probability for that must be pretty low. So after completing the test and scoring 128 this time, I took the test a third time, this time just picking the answers randomly without trying to get them right. The result was 95. Seems somehow odd to me that one can just click randomly, and still end up in the average range, doesn't it? As an experiment, I took the test a fourth time, this time making sure to pick the wrong answer for each question. The result: 76. Worse, indeed. But it strikes me as very odd that even with no way of doing worse in the test, the score is still rated as only one category below the average range. And yes, the same questions appeared several times over these four tests. It would seem to me that this whole society a scam. A hoax, designed to give everyone who takes the test high scores so that they will be fooled into buying a membership. Is this kind of activity legal? If this is not a scam, and is indeed a test as legal as you claim, I would be very interested in a comment on the matter, or an explanation for these abnormalities in the scores.

Sincerely,
Sami Ylinen

I really hope they write me back, it would be really interesting to see what their answer is. The url of the website is http://www.highiqsociety.org. If you feel like it, take the test and write your result as a comment to this post. I would be most interested in hearing how you score on the tests so we can compare results.

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