A 12-year-old girl has scored higher in an IQ test than the projected scores of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking .
Jessica Casey, who was dividing numbers aged three and started reading when she was one, achieved 162 marks on a Mensa paper, the maximum possible.
The teenager'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 recently turned 13 since sitting the test, said she was very pleased, but downplayed her efforts saying she didn’t need to practice beforehand.
Her older brother Harrison,15, also a pupil at Aberdare Community School in Wales, received the same score when he took the two-hour Mensa test aged 12.
Jessica, who has never missed a day’s lessons until the coronavirus pandemic shut the classroom said her favourite subjects are art and English, but she’s in top sets for everything.
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When not doing schoolwork for the 14 GCSEs she is preparing to sit she likes listening to music and reading.
“It’s fine, I guess, being in Mensa. I’m quite a relaxed person,” told Walesonline
“I didn’t have to revise for it. It’s pattern recognition and things like that.
“I just seem to remember things."
She said she was glad school re-opened again this term and she could see her friends and teachers again after lockdown closure, but it had not affected her academic work.
“There was more flexibility in a way studying at home because we didn’t have all live streamed lessons and you didn’t have to do everything at a set time but we were given lots of work," she said.
“I prefer being back at school. It’s nice to be back and see everyone personally.”
Jessica said she gets on well with her older brother. His plans to take some GCSEs early last summer were stalled when all exams were cancelled.
Jessica, who read the Hunger Games series in primary school, is now reading Jane Eyre. But she 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.
The talented siblings’ 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: “Jessica’s score of 162 is the highest that can be achieved on the Cattell III B test by someone under the age of 18 – for adults it is 161.
“This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to be any brighter – the psychologists who devised the test believe that further differentiation between ability levels above 162 is not accurate enough to be meaningful.
“Obviously, as 162 represents the top end of the top one per cent, it isn’t “usual” but a Google search will show you some other children who have scored the same.
“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.”
