Changes to American Mensa’s Admission Test Course

During my onboarding process and review of all assessments and psychometric properties (including pass rate) Mensa uses for its “Culture Fair” battery, I determined that these nonverbal assessments are no longer considered valid instruments to measure IQ.

As a result of this assessment, American Mensa will discontinue all administration of the Culture Fair test battery on Feb. 21, 2022.

The Cattell assessment was initially designed and created in the late 1940s and adapted over time to eliminate any known sociocultural and environmental bias. At the time, other measures of intelligence in circulation were biased, and there was certainly a need to void IQ assessments of bias. The understanding of intelligence has since shifted within the field of psychology over the past 70 years.

Discontinuing this battery in no way means the two assessments we will continue to utilize are, in some way, inherently biased. Newer assessments (including the RAIT and Wonderlic) have been designed, developed, and adapted over time to sample many types of people, with many types of backgrounds and many types of secondary conditions to ensure that the intelligence scores derived are valid and reliable and not biased because of ethnicity, religion, cultural background, or disability.

For instance, during the development of the RAIT, a “Bias Review” was completed. This means that a panel of individuals consisting of people of various ethnicities reviewed and evaluated all content to ensure its quality and fairness. The feedback provided by the panel was used in conjunction with expert review results and general item analysis to aid in the determination of which items on the assessment should be kept, revised, or removed.

Additionally, this does not mean that we are necessarily reducing the opportunities to qualify to two scores. In fact, various scores are calculated and utilized between the RAIT and Wonderlic as qualification into Mensa to ensure additional fairness in IQ evaluation. We are also exploring the expansion of calculated quotients from six to seven to include a newly developed Nonverbal score for the RAIT. Ultimately, utilizing multiple score calculations within the RAIT reduces the likelihood of a false negative qualification into Mensa.

It was my hope that an alternative battery could be found to replace the Nonverbal battery and integrated, both quickly and seamlessly, during the non-testing period of the pandemic. It has been a long and arduous process to find an appropriate replacement. We continue to explore various assessments to determine a good fit for the needs of Mensa and the needs of our testing candidates.

We are currently exploring the development of a new assessment to be used by Mensa only, as well as two other existing measures that are promising. The difficulty in finding a replacement is that the measure must be psychometrically sound, be appropriate to be given in a group format, not require the administrator to hold a doctorate, and have a high enough ceiling to measure, with specificity and sensitivity, the upper limits to intelligence. Thus far, I have evaluated the appropriateness of nearly 20 different measures and will continue to research until an alternative measure is found.