In January 2024, the North Devon Gazette reported about a 12-year-old Devon schoolboy named Rory Bidwell who was invited to join Mensa. This invitation came after Bidwell had a perfect score of 162, the maximum possible score for his age group, in an IQ test known as the Cattell III B. The score of 162 is two marks higher than the 160 marks that were purportedly assigned to physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Bidwell had reportedly taken the assessment without any preparation on the fortnight after his 12th birthday, and according to his mother, Abi Bidwell, Rory Bidwell’s ignorance of the seriousness of the test meant he was not particularly anxious during the assessment, even though he was not prepared for it. She also stated that he even took a leisurely stroll to the restroom during one of the sections of the two-hour-long assessment. Rory Bidwell, a seventh-grade student at the Great Torrington School, was also in the news when he solved 100-piece puzzles at the age of two.

Following his remarkable success at the IQ test, Rory Bidwell was invited to join Mensa, one of the leading high-IQ societies in the world. Mensa is a nonprofit organization that only accepts individuals who score above the 98th percentile on a supervised IQ test.