Mensa: I crashed an event full of geniuses to try to become one

James Pocock, Hawke's Bay Today reporter, crashed an event of geniuses to try to become one of them. Photo / Warren Buckland

Highly gifted individuals from across Aotearoa decided to choose Hawke’s Bay as a place for a meet-up. So Hawke’s Bay Today reporter James Pocock decided to see if he had the smarts and the guile to be accepted into their ranks.

It’s been a good few years since I have sat down to take a supervised test.

But here I am, at the National Winter Mensa Weekend, trying to join the top 2 per cent of the population.

An approved IQ test is put in front of me. Only 500 Kiwis still living have passed it - that’s the number of Mensa NZ members at the moment.

Memories of lacklustre study efforts from my university days come rushing back.

I had the option to take a free trial version online, but I decided instead to do the test with exactly zero preparation.

Come lunchtime on a July Saturday, I’m sitting in a room full of highly-gifted people wondering if my decision to go in blind is simply a demonstration of my lack of intelligence.

But this room wasn’t what I was expecting. What would you expect when highly gifted people gather? It’s hard to know but the word snobbery comes to the forefront. This was the opposite - it was relaxed, it was social.

Some of the group had gone bowling together, while others worked on puzzles or simply enjoyed each others’ company and conversation. I was at ease.

Members were united in telling me that the group gave them a place they felt like they belonged.

Bethany Jones, Hawke’s Bay Mensa coordinator, gave me a bit of a breakdown. She said there were about seven Mensa members who live in Hawke’s Bay, the youngest being 16 and the oldest, Robert Winchester, a retired chemist and forensic scientist.

And then it was time. I was directed to a small, lounge-like room with one other person to take the test under the supervision of Mensa test psychologist Aloma Parker.

James Pocock took a supervised IQ test under the supervision of test psychologist and Mensan Aloma Parker, when Mensa held its National Winter Weekend in Hawke's Bay. Photo / Ian Cooper

The test itself is made up of a couple of sections with anywhere from 30 to 50 multi-choice questions, with between seven and 14 minutes to complete each section.

To maintain the integrity of the test, I cannot share exactly what the questions were, but those in the version I did were about pattern recognition - completing sequences by recognising what the missing part is.

The questions start very easy and gradually increase in complexity.

I felt like I finished the first section with relative ease, only finding a couple of questions I was unsure of.

Although the second section felt similar at first, the time constraint blindsided me and I wasn’t able to answer every question in time.

I left feeling as though I had done pretty well, but I had no idea if I cleared the high bar for Mensa.

Jones had put me at ease though - she joined at 19.

She said it was common for highly gifted people to not realise they are highly gifted and get set back or drop out entirely in school - she was set back a class herself for underachieving in high school.

“Joining Mensa gave me the confidence that intelligence was no barrier to reaching my goal of becoming a doctor,” she said.

For the test, you don’t get given an IQ number, just an indication of if you passed or failed.

After a few days of anticipation, I got the news: I had passed and could join Mensa potentially.

It was nice to think I was in the top 2 per cent for something, but that wasn’t the first thing running through my mind.

I was dreading the thought of an editor, running over the same mistakes in my writing for the umpteenth time, reading that I’d passed and thinking ‘Really?’

I was already shuddering with embarrassment imagining the sarcastic “good-going genius” comments I would get from my friends and family every time I misspoke or misremembered something.

But being “highly gifted” isn’t about being perfect.

Mensa members I spoke with told me acceptance was a core part of their group.

Robert Winchester, Sue Greatbanks, organiser Bethany Jones, Heather Alen, Robert Gentejohan, Jenifer Jane and Aloma Parker at the Mensa Winter weekend. Photo / Ian Cooper

Jones said age, gender and ethnicity were all no barriers to entry.

“Mensa was founded with the idea of ‘If we get highly gifted people together it is going to be so good, it will solve all the problems of the world’,” she said with a laugh.

“But what happened is that people found it really nice socially to meet people whose minds worked similarly.”

James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz