IQ Test for Teenagers

The test was written with older teens and adults in mind, and it scores everyone on the same scale. It is not age-adjusted, so a 13 year old is not compared only with other 13 year olds.

That matters because reasoning keeps developing through the teens. A younger teen may simply get fewer questions right than they will at 17, without anything being different about how they compare with classmates.

• Take it alone and in one sitting, without help from friends or search.
• Use a laptop or tablet if you can. The diagrams are easier to read.
• If you want to retake it, wait a while. Second attempts score higher partly because the puzzles are familiar.

On a professionally normed test, the average IQ at every age from 13 to 17 is 100. That is by design: scores are calculated against a large sample of people the same age.^{[1, 2]}

What changes between 13 and 17 is the raw ability behind the number. A typical 17 year old solves harder puzzles than a typical 13 year old, so both can score 100 while answering different numbers of questions correctly.

Teen scores are also less settled than adult ones. In a 2011 study published in Nature, researchers at University College London tested 33 teenagers aged 12 to 16, then again about four years later. Some scores moved by as much as 20 points in either direction, and the changes lined up with changes in brain structure.

So treat any teen score, from us or anyone else, as a snapshot of one day, not a forecast of what you can become.^[3]

• 85 to 115: where about two thirds of people land.
• 115 to 130: above average, roughly the top 16%.
• 130 and above: roughly the top 2%, the level many gifted programmes look for.

You get 25 visual reasoning questions in five sets: patterns, shapes, sequences, analogies and rules. Each set starts easy and gets harder, so finding the last question or two in a set very tough is normal. A 12-minute timer runs for the whole test.

There is nothing to read and no school knowledge to recall, so it does not matter which subjects you have studied. You can start without signing up. When you finish, you choose a report to see your result. If you want to know what to expect first, the guide on how to prepare for an IQ test covers pacing, sleep and what practice really does to a score.

The test is the same at every age, but what it means for you changes a little. Reasoning on timed puzzles keeps developing through the teens, so the same person usually finds the puzzles easier at 17 than at 13.

On a properly age-normed test, the table below applies to every teen age: the same IQ means the same thing at 13 and at 17, because each age is compared only with its own age group. See average IQ by age for the full year-by-year answers.

Our test is not age-normed. It reports an estimate on the adult-style scale, so you are being measured against adult-style scoring, not against other 14 year olds. A younger teen who lands near 100 is therefore doing well on this scale, and a lower number at 13 or 14 is not a verdict on you. Retake in a year and compare with yourself.