Mensa challenges Bulgaria’s MP candidates to take IQ tests – and only four out of more than 4000 agree

Repeating a challenge that it issued in previous elections, Mensa Bulgaria called on the more than 4000 would-be members of Parliament to take an IQ test. Four agreed.

That is a quarter of the grand total of 16 who accepted the challenge when Bulgaria held early parliamentary elections in October 2014.

None of those who accepted this time around, about two weeks ahead of Bulgaria’s March 26 2017 early parliamentary elections, were major political figures, reports on March 11 said.

The test involves 45 questions of logic, that the candidates have 30 minutes to answer.

The challenge involves not only taking the test but also agreeing to the score being made public.

One candidate MP was not taking such a test for the first time. A participant in a Miss Student contest in 2005, the candidate back then was measured as having an IQ of 164.

According to a report by Nova Televizia, all four who took the test this time round insisted that intelligence alone was not a sufficient quality to be an MP.

In 2016, Mensa announced that out of Bulgaria’s 21 presidential candidates that it had invited to take an IQ test, only four showed up. They were Roumen Gulubinov, Dimitar Ivanov, Diana Dimitrova and Plamen Paskov. Their average result was 95, which Mensa described as “below average for society”. In the presidential elections, all four were eliminated at the first round.

Membership of Mensa is open to people who have attained a score within the upper two per cent of the general population on an approved intelligence test that has been properly administered and supervised.

Mensa was founded in the UK in 1946 and the Bulgarian organisation became part of Mensa International in 1998.

(Image: ArtM/freeimages.com)

/Politics

Comments

comments

The Sofia Globe staff

The Sofia Globe - the Sofia-based fully independent English-language news and features website, covering Bulgaria, the Balkans and the EU. Sign up to subscribe to sofiaglobe.com's daily bulletin through the form on our homepage. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32709292