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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. I'm an LSAT instructor. My first reaction to reading the instructor's comment was, 'Ha, only 165, he's no genius'.

But, MENSA accepts 163 as a cutoff LSAT score for entry. So if MENSA == genius, then he is a genius.

Among people who take the LSAT though, he's only 92nd percentile. He doesn't have much business teaching the test. Anyone who's at an Ivy League law school has a better score than him.

I completely agree that intelligence, on it's own, is near useless. It needs to be combined with the other elements that make someone effective. THEN, and only then, do you have the ingredients for something powerful.

Our society lionizes intelligence to the point that many people with little but intelligence smugly rest on their laurels, and accomplish less than their potential due to defects in social skills, initiative, etc.

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Anyone at an Ivy League law school might have more lucrative opportunities than teaching LSAT classes.

You'd be surprised ;)

On an hourly basis, you can earn more teaching the LSAT than as an Ivy League law grad. Mind you, I don't work 80 hour weeks, so I don't make as much on an absolute basis, but the work is more interesting, and I've branched out into LSAT books and an online LSAT course.

But mainly, I wanted to point out that the instructor is unreasonably arrogant. By comparison with his reference group, he's far from exceptional.

By implication, the Mensa cut-off is also far from 'genius'. Top 2% is 1 in 50.

To be fair, that's 1 in 50 from a group that was relatively accomplished in an academic setting before the test. But I agree that it doesn't qualify as "genius."

I may not have been clear, my posts mix LSAT percentiles and IQ percentiles.

The Mensa cut-off is top 2% of the general public. 98th percentile on an IQ test.

For the LSAT, they accept 163 as meeting that cut-off. Relative to other LSAT takers however, a 163 is 92nd percentile. So the top 8% of LSAT takers are qualified to enter mensa, or roughly 1 in 12.

I took the LSAT in 2009. I scored 166, which was in the 93rd percentile. Mensa lists their cut-off as the 95th percentile, so your 163/92 figure is inaccurate, at least for recent years.

Being an LSAT instructor is surprisingly remunerative. One of the big test prep companies pays $50/hour, which is about the same as what a first year associate makes at a big law firm (when you account for the fact the the associate probably puts in 3000 hours a year).

I don't think of MENSA == genius. More like the top 5% in smarts. True geniuses IMO are much rarer.

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