International high IQ club Mensa has announced plans to scrap their famously difficult entrance exam, and replace it with a quest to negotiate Apple’s music management software iTunes.
Potential applicants to the club, whose membership makes up the top 2% of the most intelligent people in the world, will be asked to free up space on an overloaded iPhone by syncing iTunes with a laptop.
Mensa bosses will be setting applicants the task of creating a number of playlists, some of which contain duplicate songs, and then adding tunes from a different audio sources, some podcasts and a short film. Not all of the material will fit on the phone and applicants will be judged on their decisions about what to leave out.
Further complication will be added by constant reminders to update the iPhone’s operating software, and applicants risk losing valuable time on the task if they get stuck in an infinity loop because there is insufficient space on the phone to do so.
Users will be asked to work out whether syncing means putting all the stuff on the iPhone back on the computer or the other way around, whilst being confounded by a number of contradictory messages and worrying about how long all this is going to take.
Several of the songs on the iPhone were once purchased using a different Apple ID, and applicants will be expected to infer whether removing them means they’re really gone or just ‘in the cloud’ somewhere.
Halfway through, the task is set up to suddenly insist on updating Apple’s terms and conditions. This logs out users, who were not provided with a password and need to track down a verification code via a trail of defunct email addresses, each one requiring its own password reset.
The Rochdale Herald waited outside the Mensa headquarters in London while the exam was taking place, hoping to speak to applicants as they left.
Unfortunately no one was available for comment as they were all either crying or staring far off into space muttering “You weren’t there man”.
