The 13-year-old Aberdare girl who has a higher IQ than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking
Watch the full report by Dean Thomas Welch
A 13-year-old girl has scored higher in an IQ test than the projected scores of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
Jessica Casey, whose mother said she was dividing numbers aged three, and starting to read aged one, achieved 162 marks on a Mensa paper, the maximum possible.
The Aberdare Community School pupil's results puts her in the top 1% of the population and she is now a member of the elite Mensa society.
The year eight pupil, who has only turned 13 in the two weeks since sitting the test, said she was very pleased, but down played her efforts saying she didn't need to practice beforehand.
Her older brother Harrison, 15, got the same score when he took the test aged 12.
Jessica, who has never missed a day's school until the coronavirus pandemic shut classrooms, said her favourite subjects are art and English, but she's in the top sets for everything. When she's not doing schoolwork for the 14 GCSEs she's preparing to sit she likes listening to music and reading.
''It's fine, I guess, being in Mensa. I'm quite a relaxed person,'' she said.
''I didn't have to revise for it. It's pattern recognition and things like that.
''I just seem to remember things.''
Jessica said she couldn’t compare herself to Einstein or Stephen Hawking. Einstein and cosmologist Stephen Hawking never took Mensa tests but 162 is two points higher than their estimated IQ.Her mother Amy said she and their father Lee, a mechanical engineer, realised their children were academically gifted before they were school age.Both showed an aptitude in reading and calculating numbers before they were three.Jessica took the Mensa supervised test, which consists of two industry-standard IQ tests. Anyone over the age of 10 and a half can take the test, but the measurements scale is graded to take age into account.Ann Clarkson from Mensa said: “I would like to welcome Jessica to Mensa, where she joins a growing community of teenagers and younger members.
''I hope she makes the most of the opportunities membership provides to make new friends and learn new things.”
What is Mensa?
Mensa is the world’s oldest high IQ society and was founded in Oxford in 1946 by two barristers.Mensa’s principle is that all members are equal regardless of age, gender, nationality, religion, race or politics. There is only one criterion for membership: a measured IQ in the top two per cent of the population.There are about 140,000 Mensa members worldwide and around 19,000 in the UK and Ireland. The youngest member is four and the oldest 102.What is the Mensa test like?The supervised test consists of two separate industry-standard assessments. One measures mainly verbal reasoning skills and the other, which includes only diagrams and images and no words, assesses visual and spatial logic.
Candidates need only score in the top two per cent on either of these tests, not both, to be offered membership.
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