The CCAT test from Criteria Corp, read from its own documents

0 The short answer

The CCAT is the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test from Criteria Corp, a timed pre-employment test of up to 50 questions in 15 minutes across verbal ability, math and logic, and spatial reasoning, and because Criteria itself says very few people finish all 50, the score reflects how fast you work as well as how well. Employers receive a raw score out of 50 and a percentile against Criteria's norming group, whose median raw score is 24, so an average CCAT score is about 24 correct and a good score is whatever the employer's role range says it is. ACIS is not this test and gives no score on it or conversion to it, but an adult who wants to see a normed profile of their own broad abilities can take ACIS Quick for 15 dollars one time in about 45 minutes (prices read October 29, 2026). The decisive limit is that a CCAT result is a short, single sitting screening score that the employer holds, and neither it nor any online profile is a clinical IQ.

1 What Is the CCAT, According to Criteria Corp?

The CCAT is a timed, unsupervised online aptitude test that employers send to applicants, and Criteria Corp's own documents describe it as up to 50 questions in 15 minutes that measure cognitive aptitude, a term the company equates with general intelligence, or g. Every fact in this section comes from Criteria's pages, which we opened on October 29, 2026: its CCAT information brief (a PDF carrying a 2026 copyright), its candidate page What to Expect on the CCAT, its product page for the test and its candidate FAQs.

The basic specification is consistent across those documents. The information brief says candidates complete up to 50 questions and that the test is timed at 15 minutes. The product page gives 50 items with a 15 minute limit and adds that very few people finish all 50 items in that time. The candidate page puts it in plainer terms: 50 questions, 15 minutes to answer as many as you can, and less than 1 percent of candidates answering all 50. The product page says the test draws on an item bank of thousands of individually optimized items, so no two candidates receive the exact same set of questions. The brief adds that the test is device agnostic, so a candidate may take it on a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, in any location and at any time. The test is delivered in US English by default, and the product page says UK English is also offered and points to a separate language independent version, the UCAT, for other languages.

Who sits it is also a matter of Criteria's own description. The brief calls the CCAT one of the company's most popular aptitude tests and says it is commonly used for a broad range of mid level to high level positions. It names managers, sales executives, software developers, executive assistants and analysts as typical roles, and adds apprentice, intern and graduate roles because they involve a great deal of training. The tallies of use differ between two Criteria documents (over 4 million administrations in the brief, more than 10 million on the product page), so we use neither as a fact about quality. The pages we opened describe a test an employer sends to a candidate, and we found none that offers it for an individual to buy.

The publisher also states what the test is for. The brief says the CCAT measures critical thinking, problem solving skills, learning ability and the ability to digest and apply new information, and that it predicts how well someone will acquire, organize, retain and apply information on the job. Those are claims about purpose and prediction, and the section on validity below treats them as claims. For the wider family of employer screening tests, the page on pre-employment cognitive tests owns the general question, the page on Wonderlic scores and IQ owns the Wonderlic and score conversions, and the sibling page on the PI Cognitive Assessment covers another test of the same family. This page stays with the CCAT.

2 What Does the CCAT Measure, in CHC Terms?

Criteria says the CCAT samples three abilities, spatial reasoning, verbal ability, and math and logic, and in Cattell-Horn-Carroll terms that is a narrow slice of visual processing (Gv), comprehension-knowledge (Gc) and quantitative reasoning, with no direct measure of working memory or of processing speed as a separate ability. The three areas are the publisher's own. Its brief defines spatial reasoning as the ability to visualize objects in physical space, make spatial judgments and solve problems, verbal ability as reading and comprehension of words, logic, constructive thinking and attention to detail, and math and logic as the ability to reason using numbers and numerical concepts, together with logic and analytical thinking. Its candidate page gives the formats in general terms: for verbal, word meanings, how words relate and how context affects word choice; for math and logic, basic algebra, proportions and word problems; for spatial, mentally rotating or flipping shapes, recognizing patterns and spotting outliers. This page reports those descriptions and no item.

The CHC mapping is our reading, not Criteria's. Criteria does not use CHC names in the documents we opened. Spatial tasks of the kind it describes sit under visual processing (Gv), the broad ability that the ACIS page on spatial comprehension describes as spatial relations, visualization and mental rotation. Word meaning and word relations sit under comprehension-knowledge (Gc), the broad ability behind the ACIS vocabulary subtest, which the page describes as depth and precision of word knowledge built over years of reading, schooling and conversation. The math and logic area is the least clean to label, because arithmetic, proportion and algebra draw on acquired quantitative knowledge, while the rule discovery that a logic problem asks for is fluid reasoning. The ACIS page on figure weights says its task sits between fluid reasoning (Gf) and quantitative knowledge or reasoning (Gq), which is the same ambiguity in another format. A reader should treat the three Criteria labels as content areas and not as three clean abilities.

The page on the CHC model defines these broad abilities, and the page on what IQ measures covers the general factor that Criteria's term "cognitive aptitude" points to. The documents we opened do not say how many of the 50 items belong to each area or how reliable each area percentile is, so we cannot say how much weight a gap between two of them can bear. The ACIS page on index score differences explains why gaps between short scores are less trustworthy than they look.

What the CCAT leaves out matters as much as what it samples. None of the three areas is a working memory task, so it says nothing separate about holding and manipulating information in mind (Gwm), and none is a measure of how fast you perform simple visual tasks (Gs), although speed enters the score through the time limit, as a later section explains. A full battery separates those abilities, and the ACIS page on the cognitive domains in IQ testing lays out the six domains. The sibling page on the numerical reasoning test covers the family of tests that isolate the number and logic side that the CCAT blends into one score.

3 How Is the CCAT Scored, and What Is an Average CCAT Score?

A CCAT result is a raw score, the number of the 50 questions answered correctly, plus a percentile showing how that raw score compares with Criteria's norming group, and the average raw score in that group is 24. The product page says each candidate receives a raw score, the number correct out of 50, and a percentile ranking relative to the group on which the test was normed. The sample score report printed in the information brief states the meaning in one line: a raw score of 24 corresponds to a percentile rank of 50, meaning the person scored better than 50 percent of the people who have taken the test. The candidate page agrees on the raw side, saying the average test taker gets 24 questions right, and says employers receive the raw score and the percentile compared with other test takers.

The information brief gives the numbers behind that average. It says the normative group was developed from a sample of 106,740 individuals, adults aged 18 and older, both incumbents and job applicants, assessed for employee selection or benchmarking and drawn from hundreds of companies, in managerial, technical services, customer service and sales positions. The median score of that sample is 24 and the standard deviation is 7.00. The brief does not describe the sample as representative of all adults, and we found no statement that it is. So "the average CCAT score" means the middle of people who took the test for work in those kinds of jobs, not the middle of the adult population. That distinction is the reason this page prints no conversion to IQ. An IQ percentile is a position among a sampled adult population, and a CCAT percentile is a position among CCAT takers, who are a selected group. The page on how IQ scores are normed explains why the reference group decides what a number means, and the page on IQ scores versus percentiles shows how a rank and a standardized score relate when the reference group is a sampled population.

A raw standard deviation of 7.00 is easy to use, and it is worth one piece of arithmetic that is ours and not Criteria's. A raw score of 31 is one standard deviation above the median of 24, and a raw score of 17 is one standard deviation below it. The brief publishes no table that turns a raw score into a percentile, and the percentile for a given raw score depends on the shape of the distribution, which the brief does not give, so we do not guess percentiles. The page on why the standard deviation is 15 explains the same logic for the IQ scale.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014), which we read in their open access edition, say in Standard 5.8 that norms should refer to clearly described populations, and in Standard 5.9 that reports of norming studies should specify the population sampled, the sampling procedures and participation rates, any weighting, the dates of testing and descriptive statistics. The brief gives the size, the age range, the kind of person, the median and the standard deviation. It does not give testing dates or participation rates, and we did not open any longer technical documentation. That is not a charge against the test, only a reminder to read an average as relative to a described group.

4 What Counts as a Good CCAT Score?

There is no universal good CCAT score, because Criteria reports suggested raw score ranges for job families, built from the scores of people applying for or holding similar jobs, and each employer decides how much weight a range or a cutoff carries. The information brief lists more than 40 job families with suggested ranges, from Accounting and Aviation through Customer Service Representative, Nursing and Software Development to Store Manager and Senior and Executive Leadership. It says the ranges are based on large samples of prior scores from individuals applying for or occupying similar roles and are supported by multiple validation studies, which is the publisher's claim. The brief also says an employer can create its own ranges inside the platform, using results from its own incumbents or its applicant pool, with Criteria's help.

The one range we can read in the documents we opened is an example. In the sample score report printed in the information brief, a raw score of 24 is shown inside a Management suggested range of 20 to 50. Two things follow. First, a suggested range here is a floor with the maximum score as its upper end, so being in range means clearing a threshold and not landing in a band. Second, that range is an example in a sample report, so we do not treat it as the range any particular employer uses, and we did not open a table of ranges for other families, so this page prints none. A candidate who sees a range in the abstract has learned how the vendor frames the job family and nothing about the actual decision.

The actual decision belongs to the employer, and the candidate FAQs we opened say status questions go to the hiring company, since Criteria's support team has no access to results. The Standards address how a cut or range should be justified. Standard 5.21 says that when score interpretations involve cut scores, the rationale and procedures used to set them should be documented clearly, and its comment notes that cut scores may be set to select a specified number of candidates, in which case little documentation may be needed about how the number was chosen, though attention should be paid to the rationale for using the test in selection and to the precision of comparisons among examinees. Standard 5.23 says that cut scores defining categories with distinct meanings should, when feasible and appropriate, be informed by sound empirical data on the relation of test performance to the relevant criteria. A threshold taken to be "good enough" is therefore a decision with a rationale behind it, not a property of the test.

Candidates often want the number that is "safe", and the documents do not give one: 24 is the middle of Criteria's norm group, and how far a score must exceed it to clear a particular employer's bar is not stated anywhere we read. The next sections explain why a few points either way are less informative than they appear.

5 Why Does a 15 Minute Test Measure Speed as Well as Ability?

A 50 item test with a 15 minute limit allows about 18 seconds per question on average, so a CCAT raw score reflects how quickly a person works accurately as well as how hard a problem they can solve, and the Standards call that dependence on the rate of work speededness. The 18 seconds is our arithmetic (900 seconds divided by 50 items), and Criteria does not claim a per item budget. What Criteria does say is that very few people finish all 50 items in the 15 minutes (the product page), that most candidates will not complete every question (the information brief), and that less than 1 percent answer all 50 (the candidate page). A test built so that almost no one reaches the end is, by design, partly a measure of pace. The glossary of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) defines speededness as the extent to which test takers' scores depend on the rate at which work is performed as well as on the correctness of the responses, and it says the term is not used to describe tests of pure speed. The CCAT is not a pure speed test, since the questions are about meaning, number and shape and not about copying symbols, but its limit makes pace part of the score.

Criteria's own guidance on strategy shows the speed component. Its candidate page says there is no penalty for wrong answers, so guessing on hard questions is a reasonable choice, and it advises candidates not to spend too long on one question. Both pieces of advice are about managing the clock, not about knowing more. Two people of equal ability can receive different raw scores because of pace, anxiety, reading speed, English fluency and familiarity with the format. The ACIS page on why IQ tests are timed explains the distinction between speed tests and power tests, and the speed accuracy tradeoff has a literature of its own. A 2016 review by Patrick Kyllonen and Jiyun Zu in the Journal of Intelligence, of which we read the abstract, covers the speed and level distinction and the speed accuracy tradeoff, and describes methods, such as item level time limits, that try to separate the two. Nothing we read in Criteria's documents says how the CCAT handles them.

The reliability figure deserves the same care. The information brief reports a Cronbach's alpha of 0.86 for the CCAT on a sample of 97,929 test takers and describes it as a very high degree of reliability, and it notes that an alpha of .70 or above is generally considered acceptable. That is the publisher's statement. The Standards add a caution in their discussion of reliability: internal consistency estimates, particularly those computed by the odd-even method, are likely to be inflated for highly speeded tests. We do not know how the CCAT's alpha was computed, whether unreached items counted as errors, or whether Criteria would call the test highly speeded, since the brief does not say. So the .86 is best read as an upper reference for the precision of a single sitting and not as proof of it.

A piece of arithmetic that is ours shows what even the published number implies. With the brief's standard deviation of 7.00 raw points and alpha of .86, the standard error of measurement is 7.00 times the square root of .14, which is about 2.6 raw points. A 95 percent band around an observed score is then about 5 points either way, so an observed 24 is compatible with a true standing of roughly 19 to 29. In a hypothetical case, a person who scored 21 against a suggested floor of 20 and a person who scored 19 are not separated by the test with any confidence. If alpha is inflated by speededness, the band is wider. This is an illustration with Criteria's published figures, not a statement about any employer's practice. The page on reliability and validity explains how the standard error of measurement is used, and the ACIS page on a normed processing speed test shows what it looks like when speed is measured as its own domain and not blended into a reasoning score.

6 What Does Criteria Say About the CCAT's Validity, and How Should You Read It?

Criteria states that the CCAT has construct, criterion and predictive validity, and the figures it prints are a correlation of .78 with the Wonderlic Personnel Test in 34 people, .55 with the Minicog Rapid Assessment Battery in 355 people, .33 with performance in a training period in 745 sales representatives and .44 with supervisor rated performance in 42 social workers. These numbers are all in the information brief, and each is a claim by the publisher about its own test, not a finding we checked. The brief says the CCAT is an especially effective predictor for jobs that require problem solving, learning, critical thinking, and verbal and mathematical reasoning. The product page says correlations with leading employment aptitude tests range from .55 to .8, and that CCAT results correlate significantly with job performance for a wide variety of jobs.

Read plainly, the evidence has three features that matter to a candidate. First, the samples differ greatly in size: a correlation from 34 people is imprecise, and the brief gives no interval for it. Second, the outcome in the largest criterion study is performance in a training period, which is not the same as performance in the job. Third, a correlation of .33 or .44 is a relation in a group. It says that, on average, higher scorers do somewhat better, and it supports a statement about groups of applicants and not a forecast for you.

The brief also states that cognitive aptitude is 1.6 times as predictive as unstructured interviews and 4 times as predictive as experience, while the product page gives the second multiplier as 4.4. The two Criteria pages do not agree to the digit, and neither names the estimates behind its multiplier. The research that such claims descend from has been revised. In 2022, Paul Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher Berry and Filip Lievens published a meta-analytic reanalysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology. According to the abstract we read, they concluded that the range restriction corrections used in earlier summaries often overcorrected, so that the validity of many selection procedures had been substantially overestimated. They report that most of the procedures that ranked high in prior summaries remain high in rank, but with mean validity estimates reduced by .10 to .20 points, that structured interviews emerged as the top ranked procedure, and that they paired validity with Black and White subgroup differences to show validity and diversity tradeoffs. We read the abstract, not the tables, so this page does not quote their estimate for general cognitive ability. The page on IQ and job performance reviews the general mental ability literature in detail.

The Standards give a way to read all of this. Standard 11.8 asks those who run and interpret predictor-criterion studies to identify artifacts such as measurement error and range restriction, and its comment says that when corrections are applied both corrected and uncorrected values should be presented. The brief prints correlations without saying whether they are corrected. Standard 11.9 says evidence of predictor-criterion relationships in a local situation should not be inferred from a single previous validation study unless it was done under favorable conditions and the current situation corresponds closely to it. The APA's Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation (2020), which we read, say in the discussion of psychometric principles that there is no absolute standard for establishing that an inference based on test scores is valid for a particular purpose. For a candidate, the practical reading is modest and fair: the publisher presents evidence that the test relates to training and job outcomes in some groups, the evidence is not independent, and its strength for any one role is a question for the employer to answer.

7 What Happens to Your CCAT Score After You Finish?

Your result is emailed to the company that sent you the test and, according to Criteria's candidate FAQs, to no one else, so what happens next is the employer's decision, and the Standards ask that any decision combining a score with other information explain the role of each. The FAQs we opened state that results are emailed directly to the company you applied to, that the Criteria support team does not have access to your results, and that results are not shared with any other company. They also state that if you apply to another company you must complete that company's assessments, even if you recently finished others. An invitation may carry an expiration date, and only the employer can extend it, since Criteria's support team cannot grant extensions for employers.

What the employer sees is described in the information brief. A Candidate Summary Report gives a snapshot of each test the candidate completed and, if the employer has enabled it, a Talent Signal, which the brief describes as a weighted average of performance across tests. A Candidate Score Report gives the raw score out of 50, the percentile, a graph of the raw score on a normal distribution, a shaded suggested range if the test was associated with a job, and the percentile for each of the three areas. The candidate page describes the score as one factor among many in hiring decisions.

The Standards are explicit that combining test scores with other information needs support. Standard 11.4 says that when multiple test scores or test scores and nontest information are integrated to make a decision, the role played by each should be clearly explained and the inference drawn from each source should be supported by validity evidence. Its comment says a decision maker may integrate test scores with interviews, reference checks and many other sources, and that treating a high score on a test of a single narrow domain as showing overall job suitability, so that reference checks become unnecessary, would be an inappropriate inference. Standard 9.18 adds that test users should explain to test takers their opportunities, if any, to retake an examination and whether earlier and later scores will be reported. Criteria's candidate FAQs do not state a general retake policy, and its blog post of July 14, 2025 says employers can inform candidates about possible supervised retesting. So the answer to "can I retake it" is the employer's, and the place to ask is the recruiter.

Criteria's FAQs do not address accommodations or disability related requests, so a candidate who needs a change to the conditions should ask the hiring company early. The APA guidelines, in their discussion of employment selection as an area of practice, say the competent user of tests strives to understand the purpose of an evaluation, who the client is and who has a legal right to access the results. Those are sensible questions for a candidate too: who asked for this, who sees it, and what decision does it feed. The sibling page on the IQ test for a job interview takes up what candidates meet at that stage.

8 Can You Practice for the CCAT, and What Do Retests Show?

Practicing the format is legitimate and Criteria itself recommends it, but cognitive test scores do rise on a retest, more so with coaching and identical forms, and because the CCAT draws on a large item bank, what carries over from practice is familiarity and pacing and not a store of known answers. Criteria's candidate pages advise getting familiar with the common question types and reading the instructions fully before starting. Its page on how to prepare says the most common mistake is rushing through instructions. Its practice tests page describes its practice material as shortened simulations that do not reflect the exact experience or full difficulty level of the assessment, meant to help candidates become familiar with the types of questions to expect, and it does not claim that practice improves scores.

This page prints no CCAT question, and it links to no site that sells, posts or discusses questions. There are three reasons. The questions on a test with a bank of thousands of items are secure materials, and the Standards, in their chapter on fairness, say that unauthorized distribution of items to some examinees but not others could give those test takers an advantage and that results should then be interpreted with caution. Practice sites are commercial products whose relation to the real item bank we cannot verify. And forum threads, where searches for "CCAT reddit" lead, are self reports with no way to check which version, time limit or conditions applied, so we did not use them.

On what practice does to scores, the best evidence we opened is general and not specific to the CCAT. John Hausknecht, Jane Halpert, Nicole Di Paolo and Meghan Moriarty Gerrard summarized 50 studies of practice effects on cognitive ability tests in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2007. The abstract reports results from 107 samples and 134,436 participants and an adjusted overall effect size of .26, with larger effects when practice was accompanied by test coaching and when identical forms were used, and it says more research was needed on how retesting affects validity inferences. Those studies were not of the CCAT, so the number is not a forecast of what a CCAT candidate gains. It does show that familiarity matters, and that coaching and identical forms are where the larger effects were found. The ACIS page on retaking an IQ test reviews a larger body of retest research and what a second score does and does not mean.

There is a second side to retesting. The information brief says Criteria creates detailed logs of each session, including time spent in the assessment and individual issues and actions. The Standards note in their chapter on test takers' rights that testing programs may use indicators such as unusual response patterns, large score changes on retesting and response speed to examine whether scores were obtained fairly, and that test takers should be told their responses may receive special scrutiny. We read nothing in Criteria's public pages about how it treats a repeated attempt, so ask the employer. The sensible preparation is the one the publisher recommends: understand the format, manage the clock, answer every question, and sit the test in a quiet space.

ACIS is not preparation for the CCAT. Taking an ACIS form does not rehearse CCAT item types or timing, and this page makes no claim that it changes a CCAT result. If you want a free and normed look at your own abilities for your own purposes, the ACIS page on a free cognitive ability test explains what that is, with the limits stated.

9 Which Real Options Show an Adult Their Abilities, and How Do They Compare?

The real options differ in who sends the test, whether anyone supervises it, who the score is compared with and who receives the result, and an employer screener is built to be read by the employer and not by the person tested. The table compares the CCAT with a psychologist given Wechsler battery and the three ACIS forms. Criteria facts come from the documents opened on October 29, 2026, the Pearson facts from its WAIS-5 product page opened the same day, and prices can change.

Three readings follow. First, the CCAT is the only scored row in which the result goes to someone other than the person tested, and it is built to feed a hiring step and not to inform the candidate. Second, the WAIS-5 is an examiner administered battery whose materials alone cost more than a thousand dollars, and the page on where to take an IQ test lays out in person and online routes side by side. Third, the ACIS forms are unsupervised, and the page on the best online IQ tests compares the consumer batteries on norms and evidence if you want to weigh them. For the free route, the page on a free IQ test online explains what that includes, and the page on IQ tests for adults covers what an adult can take. None of them is the CCAT.

10 What Conditions Does an Unsupervised Session Need?

The CCAT is taken unsupervised on your own device, so the conditions you control are connectivity, a quiet room, uninterrupted time and reading the instructions, and Criteria itself acknowledges that unsupervised testing leaves open the chance of outside help. The brief says that under unsupervised conditions it is possible a candidate may have had assistance, and it describes session logging of time in the assessment, internet connectivity and individual issues, a dynamic item bank and secure web delivery as its countermeasures. Criteria's blog post of July 14, 2025 adds that time limits restrict opportunities for outside help and that the company offers optional AI proctoring and supervised testing.

For the candidate, Criteria's FAQs say you need a stable internet connection and a browser with cookies and JavaScript enabled, with Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari recommended, and that tablets and mobile browsers work unless your instructions say otherwise. Its candidate page says no calculators are allowed and that none of the math questions require one. Its preparation page advises blocking off enough time, limiting distractions, silencing your phone and reading the instructions fully.

The Standards explain why conditions matter. Their chapter on fairness says that unproctored administrations where standardization cannot be ensured could give some test takers an advantage over others, so results from them should be interpreted with caution, and the chapter on psychological testing says the interpreter of results should be told when a test was unproctored. An ACIS session is unsupervised too, and the same caution applies to it. For ACIS, the practical conditions are a working device and browser, a quiet room, no one else helping, and working sound, because Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing and Arithmetic present their items as audio. ACIS allows breaks, saves progress between subtests and gives 30 days to complete a form, which suits a longer battery and has no counterpart in a single 15 minute timed test.

11 How Can an Adult See a Fuller Profile of the Same Broad Abilities?

An adult who wants to see their own abilities rather than a single screening score can take an adult normed battery that reports each broad ability on its own, and ACIS is one such option, but it is a different test that gives no score on the CCAT and no conversion to it. The CCAT returns one raw score and three area percentiles to an employer, with the verbal, number and spatial content blended into one result and with speed built into the total. A battery that measures abilities separately reports a different thing: a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval, plus indices for verbal comprehension, fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual spatial ability, working memory and processing speed, on a scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

The forms differ in how much of that they cover. ACIS Quick (Similarities, Vocabulary, Matrix Reasoning, Figure Weights, Digit Span and Alphanumeric Sequencing) samples verbal, fluid reasoning and working memory, and contains no spatial or quantitative subtest. The page on the Quick IQ test describes what a short battery costs you in precision. Optimized adds Spatial Comprehension and Layer Rotation among its 13 subtests, and the Full Scale form adds the quantitative and remaining spatial subtests. The Custom Test lets a buyer pick subtests at 5 dollars each, and any domain you complete returns its full index score. The page on how large index gaps are is useful here, because a profile invites reading gaps between indices and not every gap is meaningful. Prices were read on October 29, 2026 and can change. There is a free trial with no card, and you can open the Quick, Optimized and Full Scale example reports before you decide.

12 Where ACIS Sits, and What a Buyer Should Do

ACIS is an online, unsupervised, English only battery with adult norms, it is not the CCAT and not a clinical instrument, and a buyer should treat its result as a normed look at their own abilities and not as a score that any employer will use. The limits come first. ACIS is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, it is not proctored, and the research page at ACIS for research states that it "is not intended for clinical diagnosis, hiring decisions, accommodation determinations or admission to high IQ societies." So do not use an ACIS report in a job application, and nothing on this page suggests sending one to an employer. It also gives no score on the CCAT and no conversion to it, and nothing we read supports saying that it prepares for or predicts one. Verbal and knowledge tasks are affected by English proficiency and educational exposure, according to the technical manual.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) explain why these limits matter. The comment to Standard 11.4 says the inferences drawn from test scores should be limited to those for which validity evidence is available, and the same discipline applies to a consumer report: a profile of abilities on adult norms supports statements about where you stand on those abilities, and it supports no statement about a job, a hiring decision or a future score on a test of another publisher. The APA's Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation (2020) ask psychologists to select tools with sufficient validity evidence for their uses and to use multiple sources of information, and a single screening score from any publisher is one data point.

The strengths are real and bounded. Every ACIS form reports a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval against adult norms for ages 16 to 90, and the technical manual documents the instrument. It is a one time payment with no subscription: Quick is 15 dollars, Optimized 30 dollars and Full Scale 50 dollars, as read on October 29, 2026. The refund wording is: "Full refund within 5 days if the report does not deliver the features described at checkout or a technical issue prevents you from accessing your results." That is a conditional refund, not an unconditional money back guarantee.

The concrete next step depends on the goal. If you have a CCAT invitation, read the instructions, plan your time, guess when you must and ask the recruiter about retakes and accommodations. If you want to see your own abilities for your own purposes, open the Quick example report, start the free trial with no card, and pick the form that covers the domains you care about. Do not report any online result as a CCAT result, and do not present one to an employer.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every third party fact and figure on this page comes from the documents below, opened or verified on October 29, 2026, and any figure we calculated ourselves is labeled in the text as our arithmetic. Criteria Corp documents are the publisher's own statements and are written in the text as claims. Where we read only an abstract, the entry says so. Prices and policies on commercial pages change, so check the page before you rely on it.

1. Criteria Corp (2026). Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (CCAT) Information Brief, PDF. Items, time, three abilities, score reports and a sample score report, normative sample, reliability, validity figures, suggested score ranges. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.criteriacorp.com/files/Criteria-InfoBrief-CCAT.pdf
2. Criteria Corp. What to Expect on the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (CCAT), candidate page. Questions, time, content areas, calculators, guessing, average raw score. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/ccat-prep
3. Criteria Corp. Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (CCAT Assessment), product page. Item bank, raw score and percentile, very few finish, languages, usage and validity claims. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.criteriacorp.com/assess/cognitive-aptitude/criteria-cognitive-aptitude-test-ccat
4. Criteria Corp. Candidate FAQs. Who receives results, devices, browsers, resuming a session, extensions. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/candidate-faqs
5. Criteria Corp. Practice Tests and How Job Candidates Can Prepare For Employment Tests, candidate pages. Practice simulations and preparation advice. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/practice-tests and https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/how-to-prepare
6. Kellogg, M. (2025). How to Prevent Cheating in the Age of AI, Criteria Corp blog, July 14, 2025. Session monitoring, time limits, proctoring and supervised retesting. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.criteriacorp.com/blog/how-prevent-cheating-the-age-ai
7. Pearson Assessments (2026). WAIS-5 (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fifth Edition), product page. Ages, qualification level, completion times and kit price. Read on October 29, 2026. https://www.pearsonassessments.com/en-us/Store/Professional-Assessments/Cognition-%26-Neuro/Wechsler-Adult-Intelligence-Scale-%7C-Fifth-Edition/p/P100071002
8. American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education (2014). Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington, DC: AERA. Standards 5.8, 5.9, 5.21, 5.23, 9.18, 11.4, 11.8 and 11.9, the glossary entry for speededness, and the discussions of reliability, fairness and test takers' rights. Open access edition: https://www.testingstandards.net/open-access-files.html
9. American Psychological Association (2020). APA Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation. Approved by the APA Council of Representatives, March 2020. Guidelines 4, 5, 6 and 7. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-psychological-assessment-evaluation.pdf
10. Hausknecht, J. P., Halpert, J. A., Di Paolo, N. T., and Moriarty Gerrard, M. O. (2007). Retesting in selection: A meta-analysis of coaching and practice effects for tests of cognitive ability. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(2), 373 to 385. Abstract read through PubMed; full text not opened. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.2.373
11. Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., and Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040 to 2068. Abstract read through PubMed; full text not opened. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
12. Kyllonen, P., and Zu, J. (2016). Use of response time for measuring cognitive ability. Journal of Intelligence, 4(4), 14. Abstract read through a scholarly index; full text not opened. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence4040014

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