Cognitive Metrics reviewed: what a free CORE, CAIT or AGCT score can and cannot tell you

0 The short answer

Cognitive Metrics offers several cognitive tests, including its free CORE battery. The useful question is what the documentation supports for each test: the norm group, reliability, breadth, retest controls and purpose of the result. Its tests can supply information for personal interest, but a score is not automatically a clinical assessment or an accepted admission document. This review separates CORE, the older CAIT, AGCT and other catalog entries, then compares the published evidence with their stated limits. We sell ACIS, so our own claims receive the same checks.

1 What Cognitive Metrics Is, and Who Runs It

Cognitive Metrics hosts a substantial catalog of community developed cognitive tests and older assessment formats. Its home page credits the r/iqtest community, while its terms name CognitiveMetrics, LLC as the operator. The CORE contributors page credits contributors by handle and describes their design, norming and automation responsibilities. These pages establish the platform's own account of authorship and operation. They do not independently establish the credentials of every contributor or the validity of every instrument in the catalog. A fair review therefore evaluates the documentation attached to each test instead of treating a company registration, a community origin or a marketing adjective as sufficient evidence.

The catalog is wide. On September 20, 2026 the tests page listed 16 instruments, each with a duration and a g loading figure on its card. The full scale group holds the AGCT (40 minutes, 0.89), an adaptive CAT (20 minutes, 0.86), CORE (180 minutes, 0.94), an old GRE hybrid form (180 minutes, 0.89), a 1926 SAT (100 minutes, 0.89) and an extended AGCT (80 minutes, 0.86). CAIT is listed at 75 minutes and 0.86, the APT at 20 minutes and 0.82, SMART at 120 minutes and 0.82 and GET at 30 minutes and 0.81. A verbal scale called VISA runs 90 minutes at 0.81, a Navy classification test 45 minutes at 0.73, and an 8 minute quant and verbal screener carries 0.72. Three tests show no loading yet: the Army Alpha, a spatial exam and a culture fair adaptive test in its norming edition. The word "professional" on the home page carries two different meanings across that list. For the AGCT, the old SAT and GRE forms, the Army Alpha and the Otis Gamma derived tests, it refers to the original professional standardizations of the 1920s to 1990s. For CORE, CAIT, SMART, APT and the rest, it refers to the site's own claim that the tests behave like professional instruments, which is the claim this page examines.

Beyond the tests, the site runs a dashboard that composites every test a user has taken into a single estimate of general ability. It offers 13 free calculators and tools: a g estimator, two compositing tools, a percentile calculator, a prediction interval tool, a normality tester, a world map, a gender distribution plot, calculators for child, word rarity, population and SAT conversions, and a guide to compositing several tests. It also hosts a puzzle board, a benchmark leaderboard, a wiki and a psychology section with a 120 item public domain Big Five inventory among other self report scales. The home page FAQ describes the dashboard as a g estimator that uses every test taken so far and a CHC estimator that categorizes those tests into broad factors; the page on the CHC model explains what those factors are. A site updates log, created on August 3, 2026, records a release cadence of roughly one addition a week through September. It lists a new personality inventory on August 31, a creativity task on September 1, a subtest renorm on September 9, a new adaptive test on September 14, the Army Alpha on September 15 and a full renorm of the 1926 SAT on September 16. The release log makes version tracking relevant: a reader comparing scores should record the test, scoring version and date, because a revised scoring system can change a displayed result without a new administration.

2 CORE: 17 Subtests Across Six Domains, Free in Full

CORE is the reason to take Cognitive Metrics seriously: it is a full battery organized on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model, built subtest by subtest from the formats of professional instruments, and it costs nothing. The structure page lists 17 subtests in six indices. Verbal Comprehension holds Analogies, Antonyms, Information and Comprehension. Fluid Reasoning holds Matrix Reasoning, Graph Mapping, Figure Weights and Figure Sets. Visual Spatial holds Visual Puzzles, Spatial Awareness and Block Counting. Quantitative Reasoning holds Quantitative Knowledge and Arithmetic. Working Memory holds Digit Span and Digit Letter Sequencing. Processing Speed holds Symbol Search and Character Pairing. The overview page offers three recommended composites. The Abbreviated Battery is Analogies, Figure Weights and Digit Span in about 30 minutes. The Optimized Battery is eight subtests in under two hours, and the Full Battery is every subtest in about three hours, which may be spread across sessions. The page on cognitive domains explains what each of the six indices is meant to capture.

The formats are the formats a Wechsler examinee would recognize, adapted for a browser, and the structure page is candid about each adaptation. Analogies and Antonyms follow the item types of the old SAT and GRE verbal sections, with each item timed individually rather than the section as a whole. Information is typed rather than spoken, with a spelling tolerant matching algorithm so that misspellings are credited. Comprehension keeps the 0, 1 or 2 point scoring of its Wechsler namesake but is graded by what the page calls an AI scorer against a rubric, and the page cites an internal reliability of 0.8975. That coefficient is evidence about the reported score consistency, not by itself an independent audit of agreement between the automated scorer and qualified human raters. Matrix Reasoning uses grids and series with five options. Graph Mapping asks the taker to match nodes across two structurally identical graphs, a task published by Jastrzębski and colleagues in 2022 in Behavior Research Methods, volume 55, pages 448 to 460. Figure Weights allows 45 seconds per item rather than the 30 seconds of its WAIS-5 model, because the site found that the shorter limit lowered reliability and loadings. Visual Puzzles moved from 30 to 45 seconds for the same reason, at the cost of a slightly lower ceiling. Spatial Awareness is a verbal spatial task modeled on the Stanford-Binet 5. Block Counting descends from the block counting items of the Army General Classification Test. Symbol Search runs 80 items in two minutes, expanded from 60 because the touchscreen version proved easier than the paper original, and it is restricted to touchscreen devices; computer users take Character Pairing, a keyboard coding task, instead. Digit Span keeps the three task WAIS-IV format and randomizes its digits to blunt retakes. The subtest page on Symbol Search describes the same format as ACIS administers it, with 80 trials in 120 seconds.

Two disclaimers on the overview page are worth more than the marketing line above them. The first states that CORE is intended for native English speakers, that non native speakers may see reduced accuracy in the Verbal Comprehension Index, and that they should rely on a culture fair index or skip the verbal subtests. The second, under Future Goals, lists a "Professional American norming sample" as a goal still to be met. A test that names a proper norming sample as a future goal is telling you, in its own words, that its current norms are something else, and the section on norms below takes the point up. The validity report adds a third statement in its conclusion: CORE "is not intended as a clinical or diagnostic instrument."

What the CORE Validity Report Actually Shows

The CORE validity report is a real technical document with a real sample, and reading it closely is the single most useful thing a prospective taker can do, because its strengths and its gaps are both printed on the page. The report is labeled Preliminary, version 0.2, last updated December 21, 2025, and promises a fuller technical manual in future. Its sample is 4,723 people who completed all or part of CORE on the site, restricted to residents of the United States (3,207), Canada (564), the United Kingdom (542), Australia (382) and New Zealand (28). The report describes them as self selected, likely to have found the test through r/iqtest, and likely to have a pre existing interest in cognitive testing. The age table bears that out. Median age is 23 and the mean is 25.31 with a standard deviation of 8.84. About 58 percent of the sample was under 25, about 76 percent under 30 and about 4 percent aged 45 or older, our arithmetic on the report's age bands. Invalid attempts, described as cases where a participant did not engage meaningfully or appeared to use external aids, were removed by a method the report declines to describe in order to protect the detection process.

The descriptive statistics describe who entered this analysis. The sample's mean Full Scale score is 123.49, with a standard deviation of 12.41, and the six index means run from 116.71 for Processing Speed to 123.18 for Verbal Comprehension. The Full Scale mean is about 1.6 units of the nominal IQ standard deviation above 100, our arithmetic. That observation does not identify the population used to construct the scoring scale. An analysis sample can be selected from a wider normed population and have an elevated mean without demonstrating either inflated or deflated scores. The report must be read for its norming method separately from its participant characteristics. The page on what IQ scores mean explains the distinction between a score scale and the distribution of scores in a particular group.

Reliability is reported at the subtest level in four forms. The report recommends reading the IRT conditional reliability at the average scaled score of 10, because the high ability sample restricts range and biases the classical coefficients downward. Those conditional values, reported for the 13 knowledge and reasoning subtests, run from 0.8037 for Spatial Awareness to 0.9170 for Antonyms, with Figure Weights at 0.8840, Visual Puzzles at 0.8774 and Matrix Reasoning at 0.8221. Cronbach's alpha for the same 13 subtests runs from 0.7398 for Analogies to 0.8681 for Comprehension before range correction. For the four working memory and processing speed subtests the report substitutes test retest reliability, from 0.7043 for Symbol Search and 0.7456 for Digit Letter Sequencing to 0.8277 for Digit Span, with a retest interval of five or more days to limit practice. On the standard formula, a reliability of 0.70 on a scaled score scale with a standard deviation of 3 gives a standard error of about 1.6 points, and a reliability of 0.92 gives about 0.85 points, our arithmetic. A separate correction section also explicitly uses a CORE Verbal Comprehension reliability of 0.919. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that no index reliability appears anywhere in the report. What we did not locate in version 0.2 was a complete, readily auditable table of Full Scale and all six index reliabilities with the method used to derive each displayed confidence interval. Conditional, internal consistency and retest coefficients answer different questions and should not be treated as interchangeable figures. The page on reliability and validity explains why the composite figure is the one that governs the interval on the score people actually quote.

The factor analysis is the report's best work. A higher order model with six group factors under g was fitted in lavaan on 4,476 records with full information maximum likelihood. It returned a comparative fit index of 0.976, a Tucker-Lewis index of 0.970, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.018 and a standardized root mean square residual of 0.036. The robust versions of the first and third indices were 0.972 and 0.051. The report sets those beside figures it took from the WAIS-5, Stanford-Binet 5 and Woodcock-Johnson V manuals and from the RIOT technical report, and the CORE model fits at least as well as any of them on the indices tabulated. Subtest g loadings run from 0.53 for Digit Letter Sequencing and 0.55 for Symbol Search to 0.76 for Graph Mapping, Spatial Awareness and Quantitative Knowledge and 0.78 for Figure Weights. The report prints the WAIS-5 loadings beside them, where Figure Weights is also 0.78 and Matrix Reasoning is 0.73 on both tests. The Comprehension subtest was excluded from the model for lack of attempts. One anomaly is handled at length. The verbal factor loaded on g more weakly than expected, which the authors attribute to Spearman's law of diminishing returns in a high ability sample. They adjust the loading to about 0.84 through a chain of corrections that borrows covariance terms from the WAIS-IV, WAIS-5, Woodcock-Johnson and DAS-II manuals. The report itself lists the limitation: the term cannot be computed for CORE directly "without a general population normative sample."

The convergent evidence is where a careful reader slows down. Within the CORE sample, 215 people had also taken the site's AGCT, and the two correlated at 0.804, or 0.844 after correction for indirect range restriction, with CORE averaging 2.35 points below the AGCT. Ninety four people had taken the site's old GRE form, correlating at 0.756, or 0.858 corrected, with CORE 0.73 points lower on average. The report concludes from this that CORE is neither inflated nor deflated. The comparison shows that CORE agrees with two other Cognitive Metrics tests taken by the same unsupervised people on the same site. It does not show agreement with a proctored WAIS-5 or Stanford-Binet 5 administered to the same people, because no such data are reported, and the mean of 123.49 is left unexplained by a comparison against tests whose own scales the site also controls. A reader who wants the phrase "on par with professional tests" to mean "scores equivalent to a professional administration" will not find that evidence in the report. A reader who wants it to mean "items that measure general ability with similar loadings" will.

3 The Norm Question: Who Is the 100 on a Cognitive Metrics Test?

The norming question is distinct from the evidence about factor structure: what reference population gives a reported score its meaning? A norm is a reference distribution, supported by information about recruitment, eligibility, weighting, age adjustment and score conversion. The page on how IQ scores are normed explains why those details matter alongside sample size. CORE version 0.2 describes its analytic sample and its elevated mean, but we did not locate a complete account connecting current raw responses to the population scale. Its future goals include a professional American norming sample. Those observations identify a documentation gap; they do not prove that the analytic sample is the norm group, that every score is merely a rank among current users, or that a fixed number should be added to a CORE result.

What the site does say is on two other pages. The methodology page pledges to "monitor test statistics and regularly renorm tests if any discrepancies are noted." The updates log shows the pledge in action. On September 9, 2026 the site renormed CORE Analogies, moved its scoring to full item response theory and rescored every existing result on the new system. It reported that most scores, 82 percent, were unchanged or moved within one scaled score point, which means about 18 percent moved by more than that. On September 16, 2026 it renormed all nine subtests of the 1926 SAT and rescored existing results. The Army Alpha, added on September 15, and the culture fair adaptive test, added on September 14, both carry norms the log calls preliminary. A score on this platform is therefore a living number: the report you read in August can differ from the report you read in October without your having taken anything again. That is defensible practice for a test under development. Clinical publishers also issue corrections and updates, so the important comparison is whether versions, changes and their consequences are documented clearly enough for a result to be interpreted and reproduced.

The site's comparisons with its online AGCT and GRE forms are useful convergent evidence within the samples studied. They cannot settle agreement with a separately administered clinical instrument without a suitable linking study. The age distribution and self selection of the CORE analytic sample also matter for estimating correlations and generalizing model results. They do not establish the direction of a person's score difference, particularly when age adjustments and norm derivation have not been fully reconstructed. Similarly, the report's discussion of Spearman's law of diminishing returns is a modeling argument, not a method for translating an individual result into a WAIS score. The appropriate conclusion is uncertainty about score equivalence, rather than a prediction that CORE must be lower. The page on free versus validated IQ tests applies documentation checks without treating price as evidence of validity.

4 CAIT: The Retired Predecessor Everyone Still Searches For

CAIT is the test most people mean when they search for Cognitive Metrics, and on September 20, 2026 the site itself marked it replaced. The CAIT page opens with a banner reading "This test has been replaced by CORE" and a link to its successor. Below it, the Comprehensive Adult Intelligence Test is credited to a single Reddit account by handle and described as "inspired by and formatted to resemble" the WAIS-IV, with the aim of estimating a Full Scale IQ for adults over 16 in a streamlined session. Seven subtests remain available. Vocabulary (31 questions, 10 minutes) and General Knowledge (32 questions, 10 minutes) sit under Verbal Comprehension. Visual Puzzles (31 questions, 13 minutes) and Figure Weights (26 questions, 12 minutes) sit under Perceptual Reasoning. Block Design (26 questions, 9 minutes) sits under Visual Spatial, and Digit Span (10 minutes) and Symbol Search (2 minutes) under a Cognitive Proficiency Index. The subtest times sum to 66 minutes, our arithmetic; the catalog card says 75. A calculator on the page returns four index scores, a Full Scale IQ and a General Ability Index from the subtest scaled scores. The sibling page on the WAIS-IV describes the instrument whose index names CAIT borrowed.

The page carries the plainest disclaimer on the site, and it deserves quoting in substance. CAIT is described as not a substitute for a professional IQ test, as not a diagnostic tool, as unusable in any capacity other than an informative one, and as inaccurate for non native English speakers on the verbal index and for anyone under 16. The rules forbid pencils, paper, calculators and search engines and state that using any outside resource invalidates the result, which the site has no way to check. The Validity tab in the page's navigation was labeled "IN REVISION" on September 20, 2026, and the address it linked returned a page not found error, so no reliability, norm or loading figure for CAIT was published anywhere on the site that day. The only CAIT statistic we could find on the platform is on its wiki entry for the AGCT. There, 37 people who took both tests correlated at 0.6957, or 0.8378 corrected for range. Their CAIT mean was 135.49 against an AGCT mean of 129.49, a gap of 6 points on the site's own data.

The six point difference concerns 37 people who completed the two particular online forms; it is not a correction factor for every CAIT result. Resembling WAIS-IV tasks does not transfer the WAIS-IV standardization, scoring rules or evidence to a new instrument. The relevant questions are how CAIT participants were recruited, how its norms were developed, which version was taken and whether an independent comparison supports the intended use. Online delivery alone answers none of those questions. With the linked validity page unavailable during this review, the historical CAIT result should be interpreted with that documentation limitation and the provider's stated restrictions, rather than described as a verified clinical equivalent or assigned an assumed sampling method.

5 AGCT: A 1945 Army Test Reborn Online

The AGCT is the one test on Cognitive Metrics with a genuine professional pedigree, and that pedigree belongs to the wartime Army administration, not to a browser session in 2026. The Army General Classification Test was described by the Staff of the Personnel Research Section of the Adjutant General's Office in Psychological Bulletin in 1945, volume 42, issue 10, pages 760 to 768. The same office published the construction and standardization of Forms 1a and 1b in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1947. A concise modern summary appears in Ferrie, Rolf and Troesken's working paper on lead exposure and AGCT scores, National Bureau of Economic Research paper 17161, 2011, which quotes Sisson's 1948 account. The test consisted of 140 to 150 multiple choice items on vocabulary, arithmetic and block counting. Raw scores were converted to standard scores with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 20. The same paper reports a Kuder-Richardson reliability above 0.90 and a correlation of 0.83 with the Wechsler-Bellevue, higher than any other IQ test available in 1951 except the 1937 Stanford-Binet. It also notes that the Army went to lengths to say the AGCT was not an IQ test. Those are the facts behind the word "professionally developed" on the site's AGCT card, and they are real.

The site's AGCT page offers Forms 1a and 1c, describes a 40 minute test of verbal, quantitative and spatial items, claims a g loading of about 0.89, and prints a table of wartime samples by form totaling 9,339,286 soldiers. Its wiki entry says more than 12 million; the two pages disagree by about 3 million, and the 1945 paper is the place to settle it. The wiki also explains what the site did to the test. The original distribution was left skewed because the wartime item writers underestimated how many easy items the test held, so the site re-normalized it by percentile rank equating. The wiki argues from a 1980 comparison against the ASVAB that the test shows no Flynn effect. It reports a g loading of 0.89 and a reliability of 0.941 computed on 1,734 site records whose mean was 121.7. A 2023 check on 58 people with verified professional scores gave a correlation of 0.7219, or 0.8621 corrected, with the AGCT averaging 128.48 against a professional composite of 132.06. Note the original scale. A wartime standard score of 120 was one standard deviation above the wartime mean, which is 115 on a scale with a standard deviation of 15, our arithmetic. The site reports its results on the 15 point scale, with a stated ceiling of 146 on Form 1a and 160 on Form 1c.

Historical norms are another reason to separate the original Army instrument from a contemporary browser reconstruction. Population changes over decades can affect comparisons, but a general Flynn effect average cannot be projected across 85 years to correct a particular online score. The Trahan and colleagues meta-analysis summarizes variation across studies rather than supplying an AGCT conversion for a modern individual. The provider's present norming and linking method must do that work. Neither an old test name nor a historical reliability coefficient establishes the accuracy of its current score scale.

6 The Rest of the Catalog: GET, SMART, CAT-II, APT and the Historical Forms

The remaining tests are single forms or short batteries with site computed statistics, six of them unlocked for 10 dollars, and their evidence is a paragraph rather than a report. The Gifted Entry Test is based on the Otis Gamma, a group test the page notes was used to test several United States presidents and to screen for gifted programs. It runs 80 questions in 30 minutes across verbal, logical, quantitative and spatial items, and its page claims a correlation of 0.81 with general intelligence and a reliability of 0.93 on "a modern sample" it does not describe. The percentile is free and the full profile costs 10 dollars. American Mensa accepts a supervised Otis-Gamma IQ of 131, which is a fact about the original test under a proctor and not about this form. SMART, the SAT Math Advanced Rendition Test, is credited to a Reddit handle and emulates the 1974 to 1994 SAT mathematics section with a higher ceiling. It runs 75 items in 120 minutes, with one point per correct answer, a quarter point penalty per error, pen and paper allowed and calculators forbidden. Its page reports, at a sample of 224, a g loading of 0.844, a correlation of 0.873 with a set of professional and old admissions tests, and a Cronbach's alpha of 0.928, and it links a technical report. The CAT-II is an adaptive test that draws 30 to 60 items from a pool that includes Otis Gamma items, times each item, runs 15 to 30 minutes and stops when its accuracy figure reaches at least 0.925. The APT is 40 items in 20 minutes across analogies, antonyms, quantitative reasoning, arithmetic and matrices, with a stated g loading of 0.82. The extended AGCT is a 200 item, 80 minute emulation with a ceiling of 170 and a one third point penalty per error.

The historical forms are the site's most distinctive offer and its most fragile. The old GRE hybrid and the 1926 SAT each carry a 0.89 loading on their catalog cards, and each states on its page that it is free to take. The GRE page also calls the test "impervious to the Flynn effect", the same claim made for the AGCT and open to the same question. The Army Alpha of 1917 arrived on September 15, 2026 as a revised hybrid of eight subtests with preliminary norms, and the 1926 SAT was renormed the next day. The psychometric case for treating old admissions tests as measures of g is real and published, and the site cites it on the structure page: Frey and Detterman showed in 2004 that SAT scores track a general factor closely in a large national sample. The practical case is weaker, for a reason the site's own catalog reveals. These are fixed forms. A fixed form with a public item pool is only as secure as the least discreet person who has taken it. On September 20, 2026 the GET, SMART, APT and extended AGCT pages each delivered their complete item text to the browser as part of the page before the timer started. We did not take any of them and reproduce nothing from them here. The point is structural. An adaptive test or a randomized task can survive exposure, and a static 80 item form cannot. That is why every publisher of a real admissions test retires forms, and why the site's terms refuse to release item level responses "to protect testing integrity." The page on high range IQ tests covers the same exposure problem in the untimed puzzle tests that circulate in the same community.

7 What Is Free, What Costs 10 Dollars, and What the Terms Say

The honest summary of the pricing is that testing is free and reporting is not, except for CORE, and the terms make every charge final once a result exists. CORE is free from the first subtest to the full battery, and the dashboard reports it without payment. Six test pages opened on September 20, 2026 carry the same sentence near the start button: after taking the test, the site requires a 10 dollar payment for the full score profile. They are the AGCT, the extended AGCT, GET, SMART, APT and CAT-II, and the GET adds that a percentile is provided free before that step. The old GRE hybrid, the 1926 SAT and the Navy classification test state on their pages that they are free, and the five newest tests, VISA, RQVT, the Army Alpha, ATAT and the spatial exam, state no price on their pages at all. There is no subscription, no recurring charge and no card taken before a test begins, which is the arrangement the paid IQ test page found to be the least complained about model on the market. The home page FAQ mentions discounted group pricing for teams by email. No promo code, coupon field or discount was advertised on the home page, the catalog, the test pages or the terms on the date read. A search for a Cognitive Metrics promo code is therefore a search for something the site did not offer that day. That can change, and the pages are linked so you can check.

The terms of service, read the same day, are short and consequential. Because the service is performed and the result disclosed rapidly, "all charges are non-refundable once results are generated," with refunds or credits at the company's sole discretion. Refunds are not issued for loss of access to account credentials. The materials are provided as is, and the company states that it does not warrant or make any representation "concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability" of the materials on its website. That is standard boilerplate, and it is also a precise description of the legal status of the scores. Users agree that anonymized responses, scores and demographic inputs may be used for research and statistical analysis, with an email opt out, and that item level responses will not be returned in a data request. Governing law is Delaware. The page on how much an IQ test costs sets the 10 dollar unlock beside every other price on the market.

The public record of buyer experience is thin but readable. On September 20, 2026 the Trustpilot profile for cognitivemetrics.com, in the category Educational Testing Service, showed a TrustScore of 4.2 from 111 reviews. The company claimed the profile in July 2025. Seventy one percent of ratings were five stars and 16 percent were one star. The favorable reviews praise the breadth and the transparency. The site's own home page carousel quotes one reviewer calling it "refreshingly transparent" with "no charge for initial testing." The unfavorable ones cluster on the moment the 10 dollar notice becomes a payment screen. The company's replies on the profile state that the price is disclosed before testing begins, which our reading of the pages confirms. Ratings change daily, and 111 reviews is a small base; the page on OpenPsychometrics and the page on BrainManager apply the same reading to two other free sites.

8 What No Supervision, Self Selection and Circulating Answers Do to a Score

The three conditions that separate a Cognitive Metrics score from a clinical one are documented on the site itself, and the research literature puts numbers on each. The first condition is supervision, and the site is unusually frank about it. Its methodology page lists two integrity measures, monitoring for window or screen switching and detecting repeated attempts from the same address. It then states that these "are not employed during regular test-taking to maintain a user-friendly and non-intrusive testing environment." Every test on the platform is therefore taken in what the International Test Commission calls open mode: no identification, no proctor and no control of aids. That is the weakest of the four administration modes the Commission defines, from open through controlled and supervised to managed. The validity report's data cleaning removed attempts that appeared to use external aids, by an undisclosed method, so the reported statistics describe the people who were not caught, and no verification session exists to check anyone's score against a supervised one.

The second condition is retesting, which the community's culture of taking many tests makes routine. Scharfen, Peters and Holling's meta-analysis of retest effects, Intelligence 2018, volume 67, pages 44 to 66, pooled 174 samples from 122 studies with 153,185 participants. Scores rose by 0.33 standard deviations from a first to a second administration and by 0.50 standard deviations by the third, with no further gain after that. On an IQ scale that is about 5 points at the second sitting and about 7.5 at the third, our arithmetic. Identical forms produced gains 0.15 standard deviations larger than alternate forms, and longer intervals shrank the effect only slowly. Estevis, Basso and Combs retested 54 adults on the WAIS-IV after three or six months and reported the result in The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 2012, volume 26, issue 2, pages 239 to 254. Full Scale IQ rose by about 7 points and Processing Speed by about 9, and the interval made no difference. The site's design choices show awareness of this: Digit Span and Digit Letter Sequencing randomize their content, the reliability study used a five day retest interval, the CAT-II is adaptive, and the new culture fair test is built to become adaptive once its norming edition is complete. The static forms are not protected, and a second attempt at a fixed form is a practice score by definition. The page on how to prepare for an IQ test separates legitimate preparation from contamination.

The third condition is who takes the tests and what they have already seen. A sample that averages 123.49 and is three quarters under 30 is a sample of enthusiasts. Enthusiasts on this platform have usually taken several tests before CORE, which is how the report obtained 215 people with AGCT scores and 94 with GRE scores to correlate against. Practice on one test transfers to formats shared with the next, and every Wechsler style format on CORE is also on CAIT, so the convergent correlations were measured in people whose exposure to the item types was already high. Circulating answers are the extreme case of the same mechanism. The validity report acknowledges that "many claims have been circulating" about CORE's norms, and a fixed form whose items sit in the page source has no defense against a shared key beyond the site's undisclosed cleaning. None of this implies that any particular taker cheated. It implies that the scale the site maintains is a scale for people who take tests this way, and that a first time, single sitting, unassisted CORE score is compared against a group that was not, on average, first time or unassisted. The page on what makes an IQ test accurate sets out the checks that separate a measurement from a number.

9 JCTI Is Not on Cognitive Metrics, and What Its Own Manual Says

The JCTI that people search alongside Cognitive Metrics is hosted by a different site, Cogn-IQ, and its technical manual answers the deflation and practice questions better than any forum thread does. The Jouve-Cerebrals Test of Induction is a nonverbal, untimed test of inductive reasoning. According to its technical manual, document version 2026.2 dated July 2026 and read on September 20, 2026, the test took a 52 item fixed form in 2002 and became a computer adaptive test in 2025. The adaptive form administers a mean of 29.4 items in a range of 20 to 42. It reports an Inductive Reasoning Index on a scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The manual credits the test and the manual to a named head of research at the site; we repeat only what the page states. On the fixed form the manual reports an internal consistency of 0.90 and a standard error of measurement of 2.99 points on 2,306 examinees. On the adaptive form it reports an empirical reliability of 0.87 on 1,003 operational records. The standard error rises toward the top of the scale, where the manual notes the widest bands sit. Criterion evidence includes correlations of 0.63 with the WAIS-III Full Scale IQ in 163 people, 0.77 with WAIS Matrix Reasoning in 62 and 0.79 with an SAT composite in 63, with the manual itself cautioning that several criterion subsamples are small.

The JCTI manual describes 8,297 online administrations from 2022 to 2024, restricted to English literate adults aged 16 to 70, and weighting on age, sex and region. It also discusses education, which was observed rather than included in those weights, and cautions that its reference group may remain somewhat more able than the general population. That is a limitation reported for this instrument. It cannot be transferred to CORE, CAIT or ACIS simply because each uses a browser. Recruitment, weighting, eligibility and the intended population require separate inspection for every test. Likewise, the manual's discussion of repeated exposure to highly informative adaptive items is a reason to examine its exposure controls, not proof of a fixed practice gain for every user. An induction test primarily samples one ability domain; a broader battery supports different questions about a profile, provided its own evidence is adequate.

Cognitive Metrics Against RIOT, Mensa Norway and the Other Free Sites

The comparison people actually make is with RIOT and with the Mensa Norway test, and the three differ on one axis more than any other: who built the norms and how. The Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test is a paid battery whose home page, read on September 20, 2026, describes 15 subtests across six indices for adults aged 18 and over, completed in about 52 minutes. The page credits a named intelligence researcher, lists a sensitivity review panel, and states that the test is normed on United States born native English speakers. The full test was priced at 50 dollars, shown against a struck through list price of 150, with a five subtest basic version at 25 dollars and custom batteries at 10 dollars per subtest. The stated margin of error is plus or minus 3.7 IQ points on the full form and 5.6 on the basic. Prices on that page change and are linked so you can check. Cognitive Metrics costs nothing for CORE and 10 dollars for the full profile on six of its classic tests; RIOT costs 50 dollars and prints its margin of error on the sales page. Both are unsupervised. The difference a buyer is paying for is a norm sample described in a technical report by a named author, and the CORE validity report itself treats RIOT as a professional comparison point, tabulating its fit indices and subtest loadings beside the WAIS-5 and Stanford-Binet 5. On the site's own tables, CORE's fit indices are as good or better and its loadings are higher on most matched subtests, which is a claim about structure and not about norms.

The Mensa Norway test, reviewed on its own page, is the other common comparison, and it is a different kind of object. Its test page, read on September 20, 2026, describes 35 visual pattern puzzles in 25 minutes, scored from 85 to 145 within four age bands, calls the result an indication and not a substitute for a professional test, and publishes no norm sample and no reliability. A higher result on it than on CORE does not identify which score is better calibrated. Content coverage, norms, ceilings, measurement error, prior exposure and administration conditions are competing explanations that require evidence to distinguish. The society's own supervised session is a different event from anything on its Norwegian website, and this unsupervised practice test is not itself an admission route. Supervised remote testing is a separate category: British Mensa offers its own approved, proctored online assessment. OpenPsychometrics and BrainManager, reviewed on the pages linked above, were both marked down for missing public technical evidence, and neither offers a document of the CORE report's scope. The ICAR page covers a public domain item set with peer reviewed item statistics, which is the academic benchmark for what an open instrument can document. Against that benchmark, the CORE report is closer to a real technical document than anything else in the free category, and further from a norm than anything in the paid category that publishes one.

10 Side by Side: CORE, CAIT, AGCT and a Normed Paid Battery

Set on the same nine questions, the three Cognitive Metrics tests and a normed paid battery differ less on structure than on what is documented about the reference group and the error, and the table is the part of this page a buyer should keep. ACIS appears in the last column because it is the comparison this site can document from its own technical manual, and because we sell it, which the disclosure section below states in full. The ACIS figures come from the technical manual and the home page on September 20, 2026; the Cognitive Metrics figures come from the pages linked above on the same day. Both change.

Read the documentation and reliability rows together. They identify information a reader cannot establish just by completing a test. A published coefficient must be tied to a defined score, sample, model and version; its presence is not proof that one product is more accurate than another in a particular individual. The page on Full Scale IQ explains why composite evidence matters, and the page on scores and percentiles distinguishes a numeric scale from a supported interpretation of rank. Free and paid assessments both face these requirements.

11 Verdict: What Cognitive Metrics Is Good For, and Where It Stops

CORE merits consideration for adults seeking a free, broad assessment for personal interest, particularly because it publishes substantially more technical detail than a quiz with no documentation. Its report describes participants, several kinds of reliability, a factor model and convergent evidence. Those are useful contributions that deserve evaluation on their merits. Its own disclaimers also delimit use: the reviewed CORE report does not present the instrument as a clinical or diagnostic assessment, and CAIT has separate restrictions. The conclusion is specific to the documented versions and intended use. We have not performed an independent calibration study, audited the item bank or demonstrated that CORE is the most accurate free instrument available. A reader can appreciate the breadth and transparency while keeping those unresolved questions visible.

The reasons for caution are also specific. Regular use is unsupervised, the analytic sample is selected, the full norm derivation is not clear in the reviewed report, and a complete Full Scale and index confidence interval method was not located. Fixed forms can be affected by prior exposure, and scoring revisions make version records important. None of these points supports a universal claim about what every school, employer or clinician would accept. Acceptance is a decision by the receiving organization under its rules. The site's clinical disclaimer means a result should not be presented as a diagnosis. For any formal submission, obtain the recipient's test, supervision, qualification and documentation requirements before paying or testing, as explained in IQ test certificates.

If CORE fits your purpose, follow its instructions, use the required device, avoid external aids and disclose previous exposure when discussing the result. Read the score together with its reported interval and the documentation, while recognizing that the interval does not absorb every source of bias. Do not automatically add points because an online result differs from a clinical one. Combining several tests can reduce some random error only under an appropriate model; shared content, repeated practice and correlated errors remain relevant. Before buying a report or unlock, check exactly what it provides. Formal testing may be available in person or by an approved supervised remote procedure, depending on the instrument and recipient. The ranking of online IQ tests supplies additional comparison criteria.

12 Where ACIS Sits, and What a Buyer Should Do

We sell ACIS, a competing paid assessment, and that commercial interest should remain visible throughout this comparison. ACIS offers 20 subtests across six domains and publishes a technical manual. Version 1.4 describes a reference frame of 3,243 adult records and a technical analysis set of 2,750 complete records, along with a factor model and composite reliability analysis. These are published analyses of the configurations described there. They must not be turned into a universal promise that every current form, every index configuration or every individual result has the same precision. In particular, subsequent changes involving Layer Rotation in Visual Spatial require attention to the administered version. The current report and applicable documentation should identify what was completed, how its scores were derived and which uncertainty estimate applies. Publication of a coefficient alone does not establish an independently verified advantage over CORE.

The prices are one time and were read on the home page on September 20, 2026. The Quick form, 6 subtests, is 15 dollars and about 45 minutes. The Optimized form, 13 subtests, is 30 dollars and about 110 minutes. The Full Scale form, 20 subtests, is 50 dollars and about 175 minutes, and it provides the complete 20 subtest basis for the broadest Full Scale interpretation. A Custom form builds a battery from the subtests you choose, priced per subtest on the order page, and any domain completed in full returns its index. Five subtests are free without a card, purchased access stays open for 30 days, and a five day quality guarantee applies. There is no subscription. The sibling pages on what your IQ is and on processing speed tests show what the report looks like for two of the questions people bring to it.

ACIS is self administered online, so identity, environment and adherence to instructions differ from a supervised clinical administration. Its quality controls do not make those contexts interchangeable. Its intended population and reference methods must be read from the manual; online delivery does not establish that its norms are self selected, unstratified or equivalent to CORE's analytic sample. ACIS is not a clinical diagnosis or an examiner signed WAIS report. The English language requirements and form coverage also matter. CORE's free access and ACIS's paid options are real product differences, but price does not decide validity. The evidence question for both is whether documentation supports the interpretation and use of the specific completed form.

Choose the route that answers the actual question. For personal exploration, compare content, language requirements, time, documentation, privacy and total cost; a free option may meet the need. ACIS's five free subtests provide results within their stated scope and allow a reader to experience the assessment before purchasing more coverage. For a consequential decision, obtain the receiving organization's requirements first. Neither this review nor a vendor's report can promise acceptance on its behalf. A clinical or educational question may require history, observations and other assessment components in addition to cognitive scores. This is a comparison of available evidence and service scope, not a recommendation to purchase the most expensive option.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every figure above is traceable to one of the following, and each is linked at the point where it is used. All Cognitive Metrics, Trustpilot, Mensa, Cogn-IQ and RIOT pages were read on September 20, 2026 and will change; a platform that renorms its tests changes its figures without notice. The percentages of the CORE sample by age, the standard errors derived from reliabilities, the 66 minute CAIT subtest total, the conversion of the AGCT's original standard deviation of 20 to 15 and the IQ point equivalents of the retest effect sizes are our arithmetic on the published figures and are labeled as such where they appear.

• CognitiveMetrics. Home page and IQ Tests catalog, with the descriptions, durations and g loadings of the 16 listed tests, and the GET, SMART, CAT-II, APT and AGCT Extended test pages, each with its format, its stated statistics and the 10 dollar notice. cognitivemetrics.com, read September 20, 2026.
• CognitiveMetrics. CORE Preliminary Validity Technical Report, version 0.2, last updated December 21, 2025: sample, reliability, confirmatory factor analysis, g loadings and convergent validity. cognitivemetrics.com/test/CORE/validity, read September 20, 2026.
• CognitiveMetrics. CORE Test Structure, with the Overview and Contributors pages: subtests by index, formats, timing decisions, batteries, disclaimers and future goals. cognitivemetrics.com/test/CORE/structure, read September 20, 2026.
• CognitiveMetrics. Comprehensive Adult Intelligence Test (CAIT) page, marked as replaced by CORE, with subtests, item counts, times and disclaimers. cognitivemetrics.com/test/CAIT, read September 20, 2026.
• CognitiveMetrics. Army General Classification Test page (Forms 1a and 1c) and the wiki entry on the AGCT, with the sample table, the re-normalization, the site computed reliability and loading, and the 2023 comparison on 58 people. cognitivemetrics.com/test/AGCT, read September 20, 2026.
• CognitiveMetrics. Methodology, Site Updates and Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages. cognitivemetrics.com/terms, read September 20, 2026.
• Trustpilot. CognitiveMetrics reviews: TrustScore, review count, distribution and claimed status. trustpilot.com, read September 20, 2026.
• American Mensa. Qualifying test scores, including the Army GCT, Otis-Gamma, SAT and GRE entries and the statement on unsupervised testing. us.mensa.org, read September 20, 2026.
• Cogn-IQ. JCTI Technical and Interpretive Manual, document version 2026.2, July 2026: norm group, reliability, criterion evidence and boundaries. cogn-iq.org, read September 20, 2026.
• RIOT IQ. Home page with test descriptions, norming statement, margins of error and prices. riotiq.com, read September 20, 2026.
• Mensa Norway. IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway: format, time limit, score range, age bands and disclaimer. test.mensa.no, read September 20, 2026.
• Staff, Personnel Research Section, Classification and Replacement Branch, the Adjutant General's Office. The Army General Classification Test. Psychological Bulletin, 1945, volume 42, issue 10, pages 760 to 768.
• Ferrie J P, Rolf K and Troesken W. Cognitive Disparities, Lead Plumbing, and Water Chemistry: Intelligence Test Scores and Exposure to Water-Borne Lead Among World War Two U.S. Army Enlistees. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 17161, 2011, quoting Sisson 1948 on the AGCT's items, scale and reliability.
• Scharfen J, Peters J and Holling H. Retest effects in cognitive ability tests: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 2018, volume 67, pages 44 to 66.
• Estevis E, Basso M R and Combs D. Effects of practice on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV across 3- and 6-month intervals. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 2012, volume 26, issue 2, pages 239 to 254.
• Trahan L H, Stuebing K K, Fletcher J M and Hiscock M. The Flynn effect: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 2014, volume 140, issue 5, pages 1332 to 1360.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) and the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, Assessment standards provide the interpretive framework: evidence must support the use, the reference group and limitations must be stated, and assessment results require appropriate explanation. Citing these standards does not imply their authors endorse ACIS or another product.

14 Frequently Asked Questions