A gifted local schoolgirl has been invited to join Mensa after receiving an impressively high score on the test.
Rucha Chandorkar received a score of 162 in the Cattell III B - much higher than the 148 required for admission into the world's oldest and most famous high IQ society.
The 11-year-old from Clarkston has been surprising her parents since the day she was born with abilities to solve problems in both the mathematical world and the movie world.
They told Glasgow Live: “We're so proud of her achievement. She's always been a bright child. She's very creative and wanted to do the exam to see how she fared in comparison to her brother who took the exam back in 2016 and scored 160.
“Rucha wanted to try the same thing before her 12th birthday because it was around the same time.
“Her score was unexpected - she was expecting a good score but not what she got and she didn't expect to beat her older brother Akhilesh who has been her role model, she looks up to him for everything.”
Under Mensa scoring, any results above 148 on Cattell III B suggests that you are probably gifted (over 2 standard deviations above the average, which would place you in the top 2.5% of the population).
The IQ test looks for competence in a range of areas including verbal and numerical. The supervised test sessions comprise two test papers. One is diagrammatical while the other measures largely verbal reasoning ability.
Rucha’s result shows her IQ is in the top two per cent of the population. Brother Akhilesh, 16, a student a Williamwood Academy, is also among the few.
Dad Rutwik says his kids were both showing signs of high intelligence as youngsters and remembers his own lightbulb moment when the family was watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
He says: “There was this film, Walter Mitty, about a photojournalist and she was able to solve the mystery.”
Mum Sonali adds: “Rucha thought it was so obvious where the missing photo was. I saw that movie twice and we couldn’t even figure out where the missing photo was.
“I love doing maths and from an early age, we challenged the kids to solve different problems. My son had a very different approach and Rucha, if we were getting stuck, I would take help from my older kid or my husband but she would come up with a different understanding altogether. Her mind works a bit differently from us.”
Rutwik explains: “My son used to get big boxes of Lego far above his age and he would sit with them and not need any help from us. He would sit patiently without needing any support from us. Rucha was keen on solving puzzles, she would come up with different approaches to them."
It's not all numbers and equations for the pair, Rucha is also a budding artist who started her own website during lockdown to raise money for children living in food poverty through her drawings.
For now, the child genius is back at school where her teachers are 'really helpful' at supporting her talents.
