Arnav Sharma, an 11-year-old Indian-origin boy in London has scored 162 in the prestigious Mensa IQ test, two points higher than geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Arnav from Reading town in southern England, passed the infamously difficult test a few weeks ago with zero preparation. The Mensa IQ test was developed in Britain to form an elite society of intelligent people, the Independent reported.
The so-called genius benchmark is set at 140 and Arnav Sharma gained a score of 162 – the maximum possible result you can achieve on the paper. It is a whole two points higher than German-born theoretical physicist Einstein and celebrated cosmologist Hawking.
Arnav passed the infamously difficult test a few weeks back with zero preparation and had never seen what a typical paper looked like before taking it. His mark in the exam, which primarily measures verbal reasoning ability, puts him in the top one percent of the nation in terms of IQ level.
“The Mensa test is quite hard and not many people pass it, so do not expect to pass,” Sharma told the media. “I had no preparation at all for the exam but I was not nervous. My family were surprised but they were also very happy when I told them about the result.”
The boy’s mother, Meesha Dhamija Sharma, said she kept her “fingers crossed” during his exam. “I was thinking what is going to happen because you never know and he had never seen what a paper looks like,” she said.
Sharma said his hobbies are coding, badminton, piano, swimming and reading. He also has an unusually good geographical knowledge and can name all the capitals of the world. His mark in the exam, which primarily measures verbal reasoning ability, puts him in the top one per cent of the nation in terms of IQ level.
“The Mensa test is quite hard and not many people pass it so do not expect to pass,” Arnav confidently told the media. “I took the exam at the Salvation centre and it took about two and a half hours,” he recalled. “There were about seven or eight people there. A couple were children but the rest were adults. It was what I thought it would be.”
A spokesperson for Mensa praised the 11-year-old boy, saying: “It is a high mark which only a small percentage of people in the country will achieve.” Mensa was founded in 1946 in Oxford by Lancelot Lionel Ware, a scientist and lawyer, and Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, but the organization later spread around the world. Its mission is to “identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity.”
