Intelligence
This test is designed to assess your general intelligence. It consists of 16 questions with six or eight answers. Only one answer is correct for each question.
Please read each question carefully and select one answer that you think is correct. Try to answer each question to the best of your ability. You have 30 minutes to complete the test.
This is a short-form general intelligence test: 16 reasoning items, each with six or eight options and one correct answer, designed to give you a quick read on your overall reasoning ability in about 10 minutes. The items sample the same kinds of reasoning a full battery uses - pattern, sequence, and relational problems - but in a deliberately compact set, so the test is a screen rather than a precise measurement.
Your result is reported on the familiar IQ metric, telling you roughly where your performance places among other people. Because the test is short, it is honest to read the result as a broad band rather than an exact number: 16 items can confidently place you in a wide region of the distribution, but they cannot resolve a precise score the way a longer battery can.
This is the quick, 16-item version of our general IQ test, built for a fast estimate in about 10 minutes. For a precise score with a domain-by-domain breakdown across verbal, logical, abstract, and spatial reasoning, take the full 50-item General IQ Test (COG-IQ50), which is the canonical battery this short form is drawn from.
The test estimates general cognitive ability (the g factor) - the broad capacity to reason, see patterns, and solve novel problems - from a small, mixed set of reasoning items. With only 16 items, the standard error around your score is larger than on a full battery, which is the central trade-off of any short form: you gain speed and lose precision. That is a fair exchange when you want a quick orientation, and the wrong tool when you need an accurate, domain-by-domain profile.
What a short IQ screen does well is sort people into broad ability bands and flag whether a fuller assessment is worth your time. What it does not do is pin down a two- or three-point difference, separate verbal from spatial strengths, or certify an exact figure. For any of those, the full 50-item battery is the appropriate instrument.
A century of research finds that performance on diverse cognitive tasks is positively correlated - the basis of the general factor, g - so even a short, mixed reasoning set carries real signal about overall ability. The cost of brevity is reliability: measurement precision falls as the number of items drops, so a short screen yields a wider confidence interval around the estimated score. This is well understood in the psychometric literature and is the reason short forms are framed as screens, not definitive measurements.
Scores here use the standard IQ metric (population mean of 100, standard deviation of 15), and like all our online tests they are capped at 160, because an unsupervised online instrument cannot certify extreme values. For a precise, domain-by-domain result, take the full 50-item battery; for high-stakes purposes such as clinical or educational placement, only an individually administered, professionally supervised test is appropriate.
Read more about our standards: How our tests are built and validated.
Accurate enough to place you in a broad ability band, not precise enough to pin down an exact score. With 16 items the confidence interval around your result is wide, so treat the number as the center of a range rather than a definitive figure. If you want a precise, reliable score, take the full 50-item battery, which has far more items and a domain-by-domain breakdown.
Yes. Taking the test is free, with no account required to start, and your free result shows whether you scored below average, within the average range, or above average. The full report, free with an account, adds the exact IQ estimate and percentile, and explains how to read a short-form estimate and what a fuller test would add.
About 10 minutes for all 16 items. It is built to be quick, so take it in one focused sitting; because it is speeded, working calmly and accurately matters more than rushing.
This 16-item version is a fast screen for a broad-band estimate. The full 50-item battery samples four reasoning domains - verbal, logical, abstract, and spatial - which gives a more reliable overall score and a strengths profile across domains. Use the quick test for a fast orientation, and the full battery when you want a precise, complete result.
It can estimate it, with a known margin of error. Because diverse reasoning tasks all draw on the same general ability, even a small mixed set carries genuine signal about where you stand. What shrinks with brevity is precision, not validity - so a short screen is informative for orientation but should not be read as an exact verdict.
Honest measurement. Certifying scores beyond 160 requires more extreme items and individually supervised administration than any online test can provide, and that is doubly true for a short form. Online tests that report 180 or 200 are entertainment, not measurement.
Created and reviewed to professional scientific standards. See how our tests are built and validated.