Mega Society

Founded in 1982 by Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin to facilitate psychometric research, the Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test of general intelligence credibly claimed to be able to discriminate at that level. The Guinness Book of World Records stated that the most elite ultra High IQ Society is the Mega Society with percentiles of 99.9999 or 1 in a million.

The public profile of the Mega Society increased with the publication of the Mega Test in 1985 by Dr. Hoeflin. In that article, Omni reporter Scot Morris notes the hierarchy of I.Q. societies that places the Mega Society on top:


 * Mensa, the most famous [IQ] group, is open to one person in 50... The Triple Nine Society has a 1-in-1,000 cutoff (the 99.9th percentile, hence the name). And the Prometheus Society shoots for 1 in 30,000. But the most restrictive group is the Mega Society, which is theoretically limited to one person in a million (the 99.9999th percentile).

Notable people who took the Mega Test, meeting the Mega Society entrance requirements, include author and columnist Marilyn vos Savant, mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, Chris Langan, and former governor of New Hampshire and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Similar reports about the actress Uma Thurman are an urban myth.

Timed and supervised IQ tests usually do not accurately measure at the one in a million level. For example, the range of the Stanford-Binet is 40–160, which is four standard deviations of 15 about the mean of 100, so that a score of 160 corresponds to a population rarity of 1 in 30,000. The Mega Society accepts members on the basis of untimed, unsupervised IQ tests that have been normalized using standard statistical methods. There is controversy over whether such tests measure the same thing as timed, supervised IQ tests.

The Mega Society accepts for admission tests that are not compromised by publication of their answers.

The society's journal, called Noesis since July 1987, has been published regularly since January 1982, when it was called the Circle.