CategoryPattern Recognition

12:00

01/25

Pattern Recognition

Difficulty 1/5

Each row follows the same rule. What belongs in the empty cell?

Your answer

Select your answerUse keys 1-5

A quick IQ test: 25 questions, about 12 minutes

This quick IQ test is already open on question 1 above. It has 25 picture puzzles and one 12-minute timer, so it fits in a coffee break. That is longer than a 5 minute IQ test on purpose: with only five or six questions, a single lucky guess can move a score by ten points or more. No sign-up to start.

By LifeScore Editorial Team · Reviewed October 2026 · The test is at the top of this page

Why 12 minutes, and not 5

A quick test is a trade. Every question you cut saves time and adds noise. Below about a dozen questions the noise starts to swamp the signal, and the score says more about which few puzzles you happened to get than about how you reason.

Psychologists measure this with reliability: how closely a test agrees with itself if you could take it twice. A classic formula, the Spearman-Brown prophecy, shows how reliability rises as a test gets longer. The table below uses it. The starting figure for a six-question quiz is our assumption for illustration, not a measurement, but the shape of the result holds for any test.

How test length changes precision (illustration using the Spearman-Brown formula)
Questions	What that looks like	Reliability	Typical error (IQ points)	90% band for a true 100
6	A "5 minute" quiz	0.55	± 10.1	83 to 117
12	A short screener	0.71	± 8.1	87 to 113
25	This test	0.84	± 6.1	90 to 110
50	A long online test	0.91	± 4.5	93 to 107
100	Close to a full battery	0.95	± 3.2	95 to 105

Read the last column. With six questions, someone whose real level is 100 could easily come out anywhere in a band 30 or more points wide. At 25 questions the band is much narrower. A full clinical test narrows it further, which is why it takes an hour.

So 12 minutes is our answer to "how quick can it be and still mean something?". It is quick enough to do now, and long enough that five sets of five questions can each climb from easy to hard.

Two quick practice items

Want a feel for it first? Two practice items, about 30 seconds each, which is the pace of the real test. They are written for this page and are not test questions.

Question 1 · Rows and columns · easy

Columns set the shape and rows set the colour. Which cell is missing?

Tap an option to check your answer. Practice only, not part of the scored test.

Question 2 · Fill and size · medium

Two things change along this row. What comes next?

Tap an option to check your answer. Practice only, not part of the scored test.

Thirty seconds an item is the average, not a rule. Easy items take ten seconds, which buys time for the hard ones at the end of each set.

How quick IQ tests compare

Short tests are not new. Employers, researchers and schools all use brief reasoning tests, and the good ones are open about what they can and cannot do. Here is how some of the best known compare on length.

Short reasoning tests
Test	Length	Used for
Wonderlic Personnel Test (classic form)	50 questions in 12 minutes	Hiring; mixes verbal, number and logic items
ICAR 16-item sample test	16 items, usually untimed	Public-domain research measure
Raven's 9-item short forms	9 matrix items	Research where time is short
LifeScore IQ test	25 picture puzzles in 12 minutes	A self-directed online estimate
WAIS-IV (for contrast)	10 core subtests, about an hour or more	Clinical assessment by a psychologist

Two lessons come out of the research on short forms. Carefully chosen short tests can track longer ones well for groups of people. For one person on one day, they are less precise, so the honest output of a short test is a range, not a single exact number. If you have a Wonderlic score already, the Wonderlic to IQ converter shows the range it implies.

What a quick IQ test can and cannot tell you

A short test is good at some jobs and poor at others. Knowing which is which saves you from reading too much into the number.

Good uses and poor uses of a 12-minute test
A quick test is good for	A quick test is poor for
Seeing roughly where you sit: below, near or above average	Telling 128 from 132
Finding which question types come easily and which do not	Any clinical, school or job decision
A first look before deciding on a longer or supervised test	Proving eligibility for Mensa or another society
Satisfying curiosity in one sitting	Measuring vocabulary, memory or speed, which it does not test

The fairest way to read a quick result is as a band. If your report says 118, read it as "somewhere in the mid to high 110s on a good day". That is still useful information, and it is the honest version of it.

How to get the most from 12 minutes

Pick your moment. Tired, rushed or distracted takes points off. Twelve quiet minutes matter more than which device you use.
Do not stall. If an item is not yielding after half a minute, pick your best option and move on. You can go back while the timer runs.
Keep the easy ones easy. The first items in each set are quick. Banking them gives you time for the hard ones.
Use a bigger screen if you can. The shapes are clearer on a laptop or tablet.
Take it once, properly. A second attempt soon after scores higher partly because the puzzles are familiar.

How the quick IQ test works, and what it costs

The test above runs in one sitting with a single 12-minute timer. Most people finish in 10 to 12 minutes.

What you answer. 25 picture puzzles in five sets of five, each easy to hard: patterns, spatial reasoning, sequences, analogies, rules. There is no vocabulary, trivia or school maths.
How long. One 12-minute timer. You can go back and change an answer until it runs out. When it does, the test ends with the answers you have given.
What it is not. LifeScore is a 25-question online visual reasoning test. It is not a clinical assessment and is not administered by a psychologist. It is not age-normed, and the result is an estimate, not a diagnosis.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a 5 minute IQ test?

There are plenty of 5 minute quizzes, but five minutes allows only a handful of questions, and the result swings a lot on one or two guesses. This test takes about 12 minutes because 25 questions give a much steadier estimate.

How long does a real IQ test take?

A full clinical test such as the WAIS-IV takes about an hour or more with a psychologist. Short online tests take 10 to 30 minutes. This one takes about 12.

Are quick IQ tests accurate?

Quick tests give an estimate with a wider margin of error than a full test. The fewer the questions, the wider the margin. Treat any short-test result as a range around the number shown.

What is the shortest IQ test that still means something?

There is no fixed cut-off, but below about a dozen well-made questions the error band becomes very wide. Research short forms of Raven's use around nine carefully chosen items, and work best for groups rather than individuals.

Can I pause the quick IQ test?

No. One timer runs for the whole test, as on most timed reasoning tests. If it runs out, the test ends with the answers you have given.

Is a 10 minute IQ test long enough?

Ten to fifteen minutes is about the shortest time that allows twenty or more questions, which is enough for a reasonable estimate. This test uses a 12-minute limit for 25 questions.

Do I need to sign up?

No. Question 1 is open at the top of this page. You only choose a report if you want to see your result after the last question.

What's your IQ?

The test is at the top of this page. One timer, five short sets, each easy to hard.

Take the IQ test

25 questions · about 12 minutes