Wonderlic to IQ converter

The Wonderlic is a 12-minute, 50-question test, and most people do not finish it. It is a rough screen, not a precise IQ measure, and modern versions may not score the way the old paper test did, so treat any single number as approximate.

Every Wonderlic score, from the same model as the calculator. The likely range covers about four in five people at that score. The last column is the IQ you would get if the Wonderlic measured IQ perfectly, which is the number most other charts show.

Going the other way, this is the Wonderlic score people at each IQ typically get. Scores at the same IQ vary a lot, so the range matters more than the middle figure.

The Wonderlic Personnel Test is a short employment screen. Its 50 questions run from easy to hard and mix vocabulary, arithmetic, proverb interpretation, number series and simple logic, and the 12-minute limit is the real difficulty: the average person answers around 21 correctly. Speed matters as much as reasoning.

Because it mixes speed with knowledge, it is a blunt instrument for IQ. It does relate to general ability. Studies from the 1980s, by Dodrill and by Dodrill and Warner, found correlations of about .92 with Wechsler full-scale IQ, but those samples combined clinical patients and healthy people, which stretches the range of ability and pushes the correlation up.

Where researchers looked at individual agreement, the picture was weaker. A study of head-injury referrals found the Wonderlic and the WAIS-R agreed fairly well on average but poorly for individuals, and the authors advised against using it to judge a single person's IQ.

The number of correct answers on the paper test is what most Wonderlic tables, including the "20 is average" rule of thumb, are based on. Wonderlic now says its current employment assessments score answers using a pattern-based algorithm that weighs question difficulty and guessing, so a modern score may not equal a raw count of right answers.

If you took a recent online version through an employer, treat your number as a rough position on the scale, not a precise value. The conversion here is best suited to the classic 0 to 50 score.

The test is best known from American football scouting, where scores were reported and compared by position. Averages by job are informative about what the test picks up (it favours speed of reading and arithmetic), but they are averages of small, selected groups, not IQ estimates by profession.

The general-population figure of 21 comes from the test's norms for working adults, who take it as job applicants. That group is close to the general workforce in ability, which is why this converter assumes an average IQ of 100 for test-takers, the least adjusted assumption of any test here.

A Wonderlic score is a short snapshot taken under time pressure, and an estimated IQ built on it is a rough position on a scale, not a verdict. A two or three point difference on the Wonderlic is a difference of a few IQ points at most, and less than the noise from one sitting to the next.

If you want to know whether your score reflects your reasoning or your speed, look at how many questions you attempted. Someone who finishes 35 questions and gets 30 right has a different profile from someone who finishes 50 and gets 30 right. The Wonderlic reports one number and cannot separate the two, which is one more reason to treat the IQ estimate as approximate.

Percentiles come from a normal-curve approximation of the working-adult norms. The estimated IQ column shows the most likely value, with the likely range in brackets.

There is no official Wonderlic to IQ conversion. Wonderlic, Inc. does not publish one. What we can do honestly is treat the Wonderlic as a good but imperfect signal of general ability. We place your score among Wonderlic test-takers, assume how able that group is on average, and use the correlation between the two to predict the most likely IQ. Because the correlation is below 1, high and low scores are pulled towards the middle. That is why the estimate comes with a range.

Evidence grade: limited. Older studies found a strong link between the Wonderlic and the WAIS, but they used mixed clinical and healthy samples, and later work found weaker individual-level agreement. The norms are quoted widely but hard to trace to a primary source.

Published facts we used

• Wonderlic and WAIS full-scale IQ: r of about .92 to .93 in mixed clinical and normal samples (Dodrill, 1981; Dodrill and Warner, 1988), as summarised in secondary sources.
• High group-level but poor individual-level agreement with the WAIS-R in a head-injury sample (Saltzman et al., 1998).
• Working-adult norms with a mean near 21 and SD near 7, widely quoted from a 1992 norm group.

Assumptions we made

• Mean IQ of test-takers: 100. The norm group is job applicants, close to the general workforce.
• IQ spread among test-takers: SD 14.
• Correlation between Wonderlic and IQ among test-takers: .75, lowered from the published figures because of the mixed samples and speeded format.