It has been acknowledged that Helena and William's mother Sarah had developed a reputation of exaggerated claims about the Sidis family. Helena had also falsely claimed that the Civil Service exam William took in 1933 was an IQ test and that his ranking of 254 was instead an IQ score of 254. It is speculated that the number "254" was actually William's placement on the list after he passed the Civil Service exam, as he stated in a letter sent to his family. Helena also claimed that "Billy knew all the languages in the world, while my father only knew 27. I wonder if there were any Billy didn't know." This claim was not backed by any other source outside the Sidis family, and Sarah Sidis also made an improbable claim in her 1950 book "The Sidis Story" that William could learn a language in just one day. Boris Sidis had once dismissed tests of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading". Regardless of the exaggerations, Sidis was judged by contemporaries such as MIT Physics professor Daniel Frost Comstock and American mathematician Norbert Wiener (who wrote about Sidis in his autobiography) to have had real ability.