A 12-year-old girl has beaten Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking in a Mensa IQ test that she described as “easy”.
Lydia Sebastian, from Langham in East Anglia, sat the famous Mensa paper over her school holidays, and was astonished to find she had received the highest possible score on the Mensa IQ test.
As reported by the Colchester Gazette, she said she test was “much easier than I expected it to be”.
Mensa is the oldest intelligence society in the world and membership is restricted to those whose IQ test scores are within the top 2 percent of all results.
The average score on the test is 100, so anyone who gets a score of 132 or higher is eligible for entry.
In the UK, members pay £55 a year to be connected with other clever people, through gatherings, conferences and interest groups.
Lydia, who has just started her second year at Colchester County High School for Girls, was tested on her language skills and sense of logic in an exam hall at London’s Birkbeck College that was mostly filled with much older people.
Only those in the 98th percentile of intelligence are eligible to become members of Mensa.
Lydia’s father Arun, said he was “overwhelmed” that his daughter got the highest possible score on the test, and said she had been wanting to take the test for over a year.
Lydia’s speciality is in maths, but clearly she aced the reasoning and language-based test. The nature of the questions means it’s pretty difficult to revise for the exam, but Lydia said she gave it her “best shot”.
The youngest member of British Mensa is two and a half years old, so Lydia isn’t quite the youngest in the country. But with a score that high, it would be wise to remember her name for the future. – The Independent