The Mega and Titan Tests were designed by Ronald K. Hoeflin to make fine distinctions in the intellectual stratosphere. The Mega Test purported to measure above-average adult IQ up to and including scores with a rarity of one in a million of the general population. The Titan Test was billed as being even more difficult than the Mega Test. In this article, these claims are subjected to scrutiny. Both tests are renormed using the normal curve of distribution. It is found that the Mega Test has a higher ceiling and a lower floor than the Titan Test. While the Mega Test may thus seem preferable as a psychometric instrument, it is somewhat marred by a number of easy items in its verbal section. Although official scores reported to test-takers are too high, it is likely that the Mega Test does stretch to the one in a million level. The Titan Test does not. Testees who had previously taken standard intelligence tests achieved average scores of 135–145 IQ on those. Since the mean of all scores on the Mega and Titan Tests was found to be IQ 137 and IQ 138, respectively, testees had considerable scope to find their true level without ceiling effects. Both are unusual and non-standard tests which require a great deal of effort to complete. Nevertheless, they deserve consideration as they represent an inventive experimental method of measuring the very highest levels of human intelligence and have been taken by enough subjects to allow norming.
psychometrician. He is the creator of the Mega and Titan tests, which he claims can measure extremely high IQ values. Hoeflin was born on February 23, 1944, in
Ronald K. Hoeflin (born February 23, 1944) is an American librarian by profession, philosopher and amateur psychometrician. He is the creator of the Mega and Titan tests, which he claims can measure extremely high IQ values.
Ronal…
Ronald Hoeflin has been a member of various high IQ societies, including Mensa and Intertel. He cofounded the Triple Nine Society in 1978, and founded the Mega Society in 1982. He claims an IQ of 164, stating his scores have ranged from 125 to 175, depending upon the cognitive abilities tapped into.
Hoeflin attempted, along with Kevin Langdon, to develop an IQ test that could measure adult IQs greater than three standard deviations from the population median, or IQ 145 (sd 15). Hoeflin's Mega Test was an unsupervised test without time limit consisting of 48 questions, half verbal and half mathematical. It was published in then science-fiction Omni magazine, in April 1985, and the results were used to norm the test. Hoeflin standardized the test six times, using equipercentile equating with SAT and other scores, and some extrapolation at the highest level.
The Mega Test differed from conventional standardized intelligence tests in that it was unsupervised and untimed. Roger D. Carlson's evaluation in Test Critiques stated that the test "violates many good psychometric principles by overinterpreting the weak data of a self-selected sample." Other scholars have cautioned that norm tables for extreme IQ values often rely on extrapolation rather than representative empirical samples.
The Mega Test, among other IQ tests, has been criticised for blurring specific domain knowledge with generalised intelligence, although "most psychologists can agree that [standard IQ tests] measure something valuable." For over sixty years, psychologists such as Leta Stetter Hollingworth, author of the book Children Above 180 IQ, have suggested that people with extremely high IQs are radically different from the general population. Identifying such people would require IQ tests with reliability not currently available for extreme ranges of IQ.
The test's attempt to measure high IQ at the tail of the normal distribution has been academically evaluated. Although it is an innovative attempt to create a test that would evaluate very high IQ, the nature of the test - self administered without time limit - which was chosen for pragmatic reasons, would not necessarily measure general…
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