IQ Test for 9 Year Olds

A 9 year old can try these puzzles with a parent, but the test is not age-normed, so it cannot tell you whether your child is gifted or how they compare with classmates.

What's your IQ?

Take the IQ test

25 questions · about 12 minutes

Want the average rather than a test? The average IQ of a 9 year old is 100, at every age.

The test at a glance

Questions: 25 visual puzzles
Question types: 5 sets, each easy to hard
Time: 12-minute timer
Scoring: Same for every age, not age-adjusted
Cost: No sign-up to start. When you finish, you choose a report to see your result.

Scores are not age-normed, and this is not a clinical or diagnostic test.

Nine is an age when many parents first hear the word gifted. Some schools run screening in the early primary years, and a child who finishes work quickly can look ahead of the class.

Here is what an online puzzle test can add to that picture at 9, and what it cannot.

School screening at 9

Nine year olds are in Year 4 or 5 in England and third or fourth grade in the US. Some US school districts use group tests such as CogAT in the early elementary grades to decide who is offered a gifted programme, and many UK secondary schools use CAT4 once children arrive. Policies vary by school, and most also look at classwork and teacher reports.

These tests compare a child with others of the same age. Ours does not, which is why it cannot stand in for them.

How this test works for a 9 year old

It is the same 25 puzzles and 12-minute timer as for adults, scored the same way for everyone. Nine year olds can follow many of the early puzzles, and the later ones in each set are usually well beyond their age.

Treat it as a shared puzzle session. Read nothing aloud, since the puzzles are all visual, and ask your child to explain why they chose each answer.
Do not time them hard or compare with a sibling.

What scores mean at 9

On a normed test such as the WISC-V, 100 is average for a 9 year old and 130 or more is roughly the top 2% of the age group, which is the cut-off many gifted programmes use. Each programme sets its own rules, and some use other measures as well.

Take care with any single score. If a child retakes a similar test, the second result tends to be higher from familiarity alone. A 2007 meta-analysis by John Hausknecht and colleagues put average retest gains on cognitive ability tests at about a quarter of a standard deviation, roughly 4 IQ points.

IQ	Higher than	How rare
100	50.0% of people	Common
115	84.1% of people	about 1 in 6 this high
120	90.9% of people	about 1 in 11 this high
130	97.7% of people	about 1 in 44 this high

Computed from the normal curve (mean 100, standard deviation 15). Applies to properly normed tests.

Puzzles to try with a 9 year old

If your child enjoys this kind of thinking, ordinary puzzle books give more useful practice than a score. Spot-the-difference pages, sequence puzzles, small logic grids and tangrams all exercise the same pattern-finding skill, and a parent can tell at a glance when a child finds them easy.

For a daily habit, the daily IQ puzzle gives one new reasoning question each day. It is pitched at adults, so do it together and let your child have the first go at the rule.