Wonderlic IQ Test: What the Wonderlic Measures and How It Is Scored

What the Wonderlic is

Wonderlic is a hiring-assessment company. Its history page says its founder, E. F. Wonderlic, "created the first short-form intelligence test," and the company dates itself to 1937. Its tests are bought by employers, who use the results to help choose between job applicants.

The current product is Wonderlic Select. It has three parts: a timed cognitive ability section, a personality section (150 statements, untimed, about 15 minutes) and a motivation section about the kinds of work you enjoy. Wonderlic says most people finish the whole assessment in about 35 minutes. The cognitive section is the part people mean when they say "the Wonderlic."

The cognitive section

From Wonderlic's own descriptions:

• It "consists of 50 questions that candidates have 12 minutes to answer."
• You are not expected to finish. Wonderlic says test-takers "are not expected to complete all these questions in the time allotted."
• The questions cover "simple math, basic logic, language comprehension, spatial reasoning, pattern identification, and more," and get harder as the test goes on.
• No calculator, dictionary or other help. Wonderlic adds that a calculator would not significantly improve your result.
• "Guessing is not likely to improve your score."

Wonderlic's older test, the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT-R), had the same shape: a 12-minute timed test of 50 questions, described as a measure of general mental ability. It could be given online, one person at a time or in groups.

How it is scored

Wonderlic Select is not scored by simply counting right answers. Wonderlic says its scoring is "based on a candidate's overall response pattern," weighting each question by its difficulty and by the effect of guessing.

Two things follow from Wonderlic's own FAQ for candidates:

• You do not get a number for the cognitive part. Wonderlic says "traditional numerical scores for the cognitive portion of the assessment are not available."
• There is no published benchmark to compare yourself with. In Wonderlic's words: "There is no universal 'good' or 'average' score for the Wonderlic Select test."

So charts online that list an "average Wonderlic score" do not describe the current test, and we found no such figure on Wonderlic's own pages.

The Wonderlic and the NFL

Many people know the test from the NFL Scouting Combine, where the league gave it to draft prospects. In January 2022 the NFL sent teams a memo, obtained by the Associated Press, saying it would stop using the Wonderlic at the combine. That did not end its use in football: in April 2022 Sports Illustrated reported that some teams still used the 50-question test in their own draft evaluations, and that many of that year's quarterback prospects had taken it.

Can a Wonderlic score be converted to IQ?

Not officially. Wonderlic's pages for test-takers do not mention IQ and give no conversion table, and Wonderlic Select does not even show candidates a number to convert.

Researchers have compared the older Wonderlic Personnel Test with clinical IQ tests in specific groups of people, with mixed results:

• A 1980 study of 150 adults with epilepsy turned Wonderlic results into IQ estimates and compared them with the WAIS. On average the estimates were within a fraction of a point of the WAIS Full Scale IQ, but for an individual there was a 90% chance of landing within 10 points. In other words, about 1 estimate in 10 was off by more than 10 points.
• A 1998 study of people referred for head-injury assessment found high agreement with the WAIS-R across the group, but not good agreement for individuals, and concluded the Wonderlic was not suitable for assessing individuals in that group.
• A 2007 study of 37 college students found a correlation of 0.55 between the Wonderlic and a broad cognitive ability score from the Woodcock-Johnson-Revised tests.

These studies used the older test, small samples and particular groups of people. They show that Wonderlic results and IQ scores are related, not that one can be read off the other. Conversion charts you find online should be treated as guesses unless they cite where their numbers come from.

How the Wonderlic differs from an online IQ test

The Wonderlic is a hiring tool: an employer chooses it, the results go to the employer, and they are weighed against the job. It mixes math, word and logic questions under heavy time pressure. Our test is something you take for yourself: 24 original reasoning puzzles in 20 minutes, with your score shown to you on the IQ scale at the end. The puzzles are different from Wonderlic questions, and we make no claim about how a score here relates to a Wonderlic result.

To understand what an IQ score on our test means, see the IQ scale and how the score works.