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I was invited to join Mensa when I was working in London. I went to one of the monthly social get-togethers. I didn't know what to expect but it turned out to be a p*ssing competition as to who got the highest score for entry. Also, I found out that the Mensa "IQ" score is 20% higher than most others. In other words if an IQ test says a person has an IQ of 150, the same person should obtain a score of 180 using the Mensa test. Considering the social skills, or lack thereof, of the people at the meeting, I declined the invitation and the test.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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The same is true of online IQ tests, they score people artificially high in order to encourage people to brag and have their friends take it, because of course it's about making money with them clicks. Same with Mensa, they score people high because, well, they want more paying members don't they? And as you found, it's all about bragging rights (and by extension, insecurity).
If you want an accurate IQ test you have to go to a psychologist. And even then, if you want it to be truly accurate you need to take it as a child.
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Not on a professionally supervised Stanford-Binet or Weschler you didn't.
Just because a thing (on-line thing, yes?) says "IQ Test" don't mean didley-squat.
A couple points:
(a) Professionally valid IQ tests are increasingly unreliable above 150. But getting a score over 150 means that you are really, really smart.
(b) The IQ scores you boast of above are higher than Gary Kasparov, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Anyone scoring that high will cause a local ripple and people would want to talk to you, and re-test you (the "unreliabilty" thing)
So, to summarize, I think I will discount your opinion of IQ testing, because it seems pretty obvious that you have never (other than Mensa) been "properly" tested.
Good to know that you are on the A-Ark 
(at least, they told you it was the A-Ark, right? But the guys who told you it was the A-Ark, they aren't on board are they?)
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Robert g Blair wrote: Not on a professionally supervised Stanford-Binet or Weschler you didn't.
I don't know them by name, but there was definitely one "professionally supervised" one ~30 years ago... And without going into detail (Real name, public forum, etc), there were significant effects. Life-changing, even.
Robert g Blair wrote: The IQ scores you boast of above are higher than Gary Kasparov, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
Which is exactly why I think the entire concept is garbage. Either I have as much potential as them, and just haven't been motivated to reach it, or the measurement itself is flawed. I would assume the latter.
Robert g Blair wrote: Good to know that you are on the A-Ark
(at least, they told you it was the A-Ark, right? But the guys who told you it was the A-Ark, they aren't on board are they?)
Pfft, there IS no A-Ark... That's just what we told those fools on the B-Ark... Hold on, my telephone is ringing... Someone should really clean this thing... 
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Sure Ian.
Can I just get this straight:
You scored 185 or 200 on a professionally supervised IQ test.
But you failed a Mensa test (passing grade = 132).
Because "Quote: Which of these things is not like the other?" questions were really "Which of the several obvious answers to this is the one we decided is correct?", and I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years
To people who are familiar with IQ testing Ian, those excuses are quite funny. Both of them reveal an inability to understand the concepts.
False negatives, ie, scoring lower than you can, (deliberate, language problems, illness etc) are quite possible on those tests. It happens sometimes.
False positives, ie, scoring higher than you should, has only ever been achieved by cheating. And usually requires collusion with the test proctor.
EDIT:
Just thinking about my own experience, I have toned this post down a bit.
It is quite possible you tested low at Mensa because of illness, or after-effects of something (I don't want to say drugs or anything).
I had the experience, for several years, of being "dumb" - due to illness.
When I look back at the (not so good) code I wrote back then I can remember how "hard" everything seemed to be.
Still, I did manage to complete a couple projects in a reasonable manner. So maybe "average" people can cut code ...
modified 11-May-16 20:21pm.
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Robert g Blair wrote: To people who are familiar with IQ testing Ian, those excuses are quite funny. Both of them reveal an inability to understand the concepts.
An inability to understand the concepts... When they show five line drawings, ask the old "Which of these things is not like the other", and there are several things that exactly four of them have in common, it becomes a game of "Read the test designer's mind".
As for the long division... My own fault, I suppose... Too much time relying on computers and calculators, so I had to re-teach myself the basics.
Robert g Blair wrote: False negatives, ie, scoring lower than you can, (deliberate, language problems, illness etc) are quite possible on those tests. It happens sometimes.
I was getting over a cold at the time, but I wouldn't use that as an excuse... If I felt too sick to take the test, I would have postponed it.
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I did an IQ test once and it gave me a score of 136. I'm also a member of Mensa, if it helps you in anayway!!
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OMG, THIS really made me laugh. Thanks. And this was meant to be a reply to Forogar's post.
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"Think of how smart the average person is. Now realize that half of them are dumber than that."
-- St. George (Carlin)
(Yes, I know that's technically the median, not the average, but the average idiot doesn't know what a median is)
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And (subject to your caveat) half are also smarter....
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Technically, the "average" intelligence is not the midpoint. So half of people are not necessarily smarter or dumber than the average. To get that grouping, you use the median, or middle value, which is defined, statistically, as the value that separates the highest half from the lowest.
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It is true, statistically speaking, that the median, rather than the mean, is the value of a continuous property which divides a population into two groups of the same size, one above, and one below. It is also true, however, that, for properties which are (statistically) normally distributed within a population, the median will be equal to the mean. Intelligence (or, at least, I.Q.) is normally distributed within the human population, so it is valid to assume that the median is equal to the mean.
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There is very little in our world that cannot be done, to some degree or another, by people with an IQ of only 100, so they would be able to do all of your examples. Your score on an IQ test doesn't make you good at something, it merely means you score well on IQ tests. What you do with your intelligence is the thing that matters.
Put another way, scoring high on IQ tests isn't a very marketable skill
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Perhaps I shouldn't have brought up IQ tests, as we all know they're pretty arbitrary and useless... what I'm after getting a handle on is just how smart is the average human being? Or, as I titled the post: how smart is average?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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What are smarts good for, actually? Near as I can tell, they help you grasp situations faster, and to see more deeply into them. The problem is, that training and experience make a bigger difference. A really smart person may be able to perform better than most people on a larger variety of tasks, but they will be unlikely to perform better than an experience average person on a given task.
So maybe that's the answer you're looking for -- smarter people can perform adequately on a larger variety of tasks.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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It would be smart to think about what sort of answer you can expect to that question, and why you would or wouldn't accept the answer as factual. For instance, if I made some claim about the ability of people with 100 IQs to program in C#, how could I possibly prove it, and why would you choose to believe it ... other than being predisposed to doing so.
BTW, the people making claims about Mensa and its tests are lying. The person claiming to score 185-200 on "official" tests has never done any such thing if he failed to qualify on a Mensa test, which has a much lower standard (132). Mensa test scores are most certainly are not inflated by 20% ... Mensa administers standardized Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests, using trained proctors, but also accepts proper documentation of results on other tests.
The "Which of these things is not like the other?" questions do not have arbitrary answers ... that is a common excuse of people who fail, but there is an objectively right answer, with an explanation that most people accept when it is pointed out to them. And really, "I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years"? There's no division on these tests that even a halfwit can't do in their heads, and even if there were such problems, manual multiplication and division are trivial rote procedures that high IQ brains don't forget. People with 200 IQs can visualize in multiple dimensions; they don't struggle with arithmetic. If this person scored 200 on "official" tests, how did he manage that with such poor skills, and why did he do so much worse on a test that purportedly has scores inflated by 20%? These are the sorts of obvious questions that people with average IQs don't bother to ask.
And no one in Mensa ever talks about their test scores, in part because they're smart enough to realize that they are likely to end up on the wrong end of the comparison. The chatter about bragging rights and Mensa wanting your money is sour grapes and largely downright stupid ... if Mensa were inflating scores in order to get more members to make more money, they would do away with the entry requirements altogether. And again, Mensa uses standardized proctored tests, the same ones used by psychologists. No, sorry, this is just the common phenomenon of random not terribly bright people lying on the internet.
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Well, 12023988, there is a lot of dross in this thread.
I am sure I have seen "average IQ" people coding C# (and other languages). No, it wasn't pretty, but they were paid to do it.
Y'see, there are an awful lot of "average" people in Management, making the hiring decisions.
I recall one case (obviously a "diversity" hire) where I rewrote a program of hers.
This was a positive mentoring exercise. No pressure, lead by example etc.
We went over the two versions of code. To be honest, you people have NO idea how bad her code was.
The problem was, neither did she. Even after the mentoring session, she still had no idea.
She was at that company for just over a year, and job-hopped over to another company - pay rise and promotion included.
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I know some people who are not that smart but have made a lot of money. I know some really smart people that have no idea how to boil an egg. It's all relative.
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How would you measure average IQ other than having lots of people taking IQ tests? It is what it is. One metric amongst many. Probably not much use for anything other than applying to Mensa these days. Very few education systems bother to measure it any more.
Based on thousands of the tests, average is simply the peak of the bell curve which arises from the results. That score is then normalised to 100 for the assessment of future tests. It is not an absolute, by any means. The Mensa qualification requires a score which places you in the top 2% of the population. The score required is probably very different now from when I took the test in 1984 (yes, I passed, though I've never been an active member).
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Yes, but as I've said elsewhere, I'm not after a handle on IQ per se, but on just what it means, non-scientifically, to say someone is of average intelligence. Linguistically it wouldn't be a dreadful insult to call someone average, but actually perhaps it is...
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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Surely your first problem is not to define 'average' but to define 'intelligent'. What do you class as intelligence? The world is full of people stuffed with book-learning who get lost coming out of Woolworths. When I taught briefly in the 80s I had a class full of kids who'd probably never get any kind of formal qualification but could all take apart a radio or a TV set and make incredible things from the parts. When the BBC's Horizon team interviewed new physics graduates in the 90s they discovered that something like 3/4 of them couldn't use a battery and a piece of wire to illuminate a lightbulb! And a Huffington Post poll in 2013 found that college graduates were equally as likely to believe that aliens had visited Earth as their non-academic contemporaries.
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Quote: Surely your first problem is not to define 'average' but to define 'intelligent'.
The thirteenth person to reply to this post 
Remain Calm & Continue To Google
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The score required is probably very different now
Um, no. The qualification is and was 2 standard deviations above the mean, which is a score of 132 on the Stanford-Binet. What has changed is the questions and the scoring, which are modified over time to keep the mean at 100. That implies that the tests have gotten harder, because IQs are rising (the Flynn Effect).
As for what IQ means aside from being a normalized score on an IQ test ... numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth, and so on.
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Member 12023988 wrote: numerous studies show correlations between IQ scores and various other attributes, such as SAT scores, income, wealth
... but average people don't know that 
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Because of social sorting, you probably have not had extensive interactions with very many people with an IQ of 100. If you were to do so, you would probably find them to be relatively stupid. But why believe me, or anyone else responding to your question? Be a scientist, figure out how to identify some people with 100 IQs, and go interact with them and see for yourself.
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