The dyslexia friendly IQ test: which parts need reading and which do not

0 The short answer

An IQ test does not detect dyslexia, and the research we reviewed describes dyslexia as an unexpected difficulty in reading in people who otherwise have the intelligence needed for fluent reading, so the practical question for a dyslexic adult is which parts of a test ask you to read, and how much of the score each part carries. In a clinic giving the WAIS-IV, the examiner presents the verbal items by voice and takes spoken answers, while an online test that uses words puts them on a screen, and in a study of 100 students with dyslexia the gap on fluid intelligence was not significant while the gaps on word definitions, speed and phonological short-term memory were larger. ACIS is one normed online option, with a Quick form at 15 dollars (about 45 minutes), an Optimized form at 30 dollars (about 110 minutes) and a Full Scale form at 50 dollars (about 175 minutes), prices read on October 28, 2026. It is online, unsupervised, in English and not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, so it cannot tell you whether you have dyslexia or support a request for accommodations.

1 What can "dyslexia friendly" mean for an IQ test, and what can it not mean?

"Dyslexia friendly" is a description people attach to a test, not a category of test with a published definition, so it can only mean something specific if you ask what is read, what is heard and what is typed. We found three things the phrase might be standing in for. The first is a low reading load: the items are pictures, shapes, numbers or sounds, and any words are short. The second is an accommodation, such as a person reading the items aloud or extra time, which is a clinical and legal arrangement that a test publisher or a diagnosing professional documents and that a website cannot grant. The third is presentation, meaning the typeface, the spacing between letters and the colors on the screen.

Presentation is the weakest of the three as a way to choose a test, because the research is narrow. A 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that extra-large letter spacing improved text reading in a large, unselected sample of Italian and French children with dyslexia, and the authors explain it through crowding, the way neighboring letters interfere with recognizing a letter (Zorzi and colleagues, 2012). A 2017 study of elementary students identified as having dyslexia compared the OpenDyslexic font with Arial and Times New Roman and found no improvement in reading rate or accuracy, and none of the participants said they preferred it (Wery and Diliberto, 2017). Both samples were children, so neither tells us what helps an adult reading a test item, and a fancy typeface is not evidence that a test is fair to a dyslexic reader.

What the phrase cannot mean is detection or diagnosis. A 2010 study of reading and IQ over time states that developmental dyslexia is defined as an unexpected difficulty in reading in people who otherwise have the intelligence and motivation needed for fluent reading and who have had reasonable reading instruction (Ferrer and colleagues, 2010). A test of reasoning, memory and speed is not a test of reading and writing. The 2012 study of students entering higher education makes the practical point: its authors write that their data indicate tests of reading and writing at the word level are enough for a valid diagnosis (Callens, Tops and Brysbaert, 2012). If you want to know whether you are dyslexic, the question is for a qualified professional, and the page on what neuropsychological testing for adults covers and costs explains that route. If you want to know how your reasoning, vocabulary, memory and speed compare with other adults, an IQ test can answer that, and the rest of this page is about doing it without letting the reading demand decide the number.

2 Which IQ tests can a dyslexic adult take, and how do the options compare?

A dyslexic adult has five realistic routes to a number or a profile, and they differ most in who presents the items, whether anyone supervises and what you receive, not in whether the test was built for dyslexia. The table sets them side by side. It carries no prices for the clinical routes because we did not open a price list for them, and the page on every place an adult can take an IQ test and the page on neuropsychological testing carry that detail.

Three rows deserve a comment. A table of input and output requirements that Pearson published for the WAIS-IV lists spoken stimuli and spoken responses for Similarities, Vocabulary, Information, Digit Span and Letter-Number Sequencing (Pearson Clinical Assessment, WAIS-IV Table 2), so in a clinic the voice of the examiner carries the verbal load and the answers are spoken, not typed. The clinical route is the one where someone else can adjust the delivery, and the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing say that accommodations can include changes in presentation and response requirements and can add people to the administration, for example readers and scribes, provided the accommodation does not change the construct the test measures. That is a decision for a professional who has your documentation, which is why accommodations are out of scope for any online test. The free screeners are a different product: a game that ranks you against other players is not a norm-referenced IQ test unless it says what the comparison group is, and a page on what a free IQ test does and does not return sets out the difference. The single-task nonverbal tests are the closest match to a reading-free format, and how nonverbal IQ tests work and where they fall short explains why one task is a narrow slice of ability and not a profile.

Competing online IQ tests exist and they differ in format and in how much they say about their norms. We do not rank them here, and we did not link any of them, because a dyslexic reader needs the same questions answered for each: what is read, what is heard, what is typed, what the time rule is, and who the score is compared with.

3 Where does reading enter an IQ score?

Reading can enter an IQ score through four different doors, and only one of them is the ability the test claims to measure, so a dyslexic adult needs to know which door each subtest opens. The first door is decoding the item itself: if the question is a sentence, you must read it before you can think about it, and the time that costs is not reasoning. The second is producing the answer: a typed definition asks you to spell as well as to know. The third is what reading builds over years, the stock of words and facts that the test treats as crystallized knowledge. The fourth is speed, because a timed item rewards fast intake of the material.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) describe the first door in their chapter on fairness. A test given in written language can become partly a measure of the ability to read that language, and if reading is not the intended construct, scores do not represent the same construct for people with poor reading skills as for people who read well. The Standards give limited English proficient test takers as their example of examinees who may have poor reading skills, and in our reading the same logic applies to any reader for whom decoding costs more effort. They call such obstacles construct-irrelevant barriers, and Standard 3.1 asks those responsible for a test to design every step of the testing process to promote valid score interpretations for the widest possible range of individuals.

The third door is where the CHC framework matters. In the CHC model of cognitive abilities, comprehension-knowledge (Gc) is the stock of language and general knowledge a person has acquired, and fluid reasoning (Gf) is solving novel problems. Vocabulary-type tasks are classic Gc measures. The ACIS technical manual says its verbal comprehension index captures acquired verbal knowledge, lexical access and verbal concept reasoning, and it adds reading comprehension to that list; it also says that Synonyms can be influenced by reading experience and that Information depends on exposure, education, curiosity and reading. That is an honest statement of how the test works. It means a dyslexic adult who reads less than peers may see a lower verbal index that reflects the history of reading as much as present reasoning. The page on what a verbal IQ score measures covers that index in general terms.

The fourth door, speed, is the one most often missed. A subtest can contain no words and still be timed, so a reader who needs longer to take in a display is penalized by the clock, not by the content. We return to timing below.

Not every difficulty with a test is dyslexia, and not every adult with a lower verbal score is dyslexic. The same pattern, a verbal score below a reasoning score, appears with limited exposure to English, with little formal schooling and with many other histories. The page on IQ testing in a second language covers the language case, and the technical manual states that verbal and knowledge tasks are affected by English proficiency and educational exposure. A low verbal score alone says nothing about the cause.

4 Does dyslexia lower IQ, and what does it change in a test score?

In the study we found closest to this question, dyslexic students did not differ significantly from other students on fluid intelligence, but they scored lower on parts of a test that draw on word retrieval, speed and phonological short-term memory, so the answer to "does dyslexia lower IQ" depends on which part of the test you ask about. The study is a 2012 comparison of 100 Dutch-speaking first-year undergraduates with a dyslexia diagnosis and 100 students without learning disabilities, matched on age, gender and field of study, with a mean age of about 19 in both groups. They took the Dutch version of the Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test, which has a crystallized scale and a fluid scale (Callens, Tops and Brysbaert, 2012).

The results split along the line this page keeps returning to. Fluid intelligence showed no significant difference (d = 0.1). Crystallized intelligence was slightly lower in the dyslexic group, which the authors attribute to the retrieval of verbal information from long-term memory, and they say the gap was driven mainly by the word definitions task (d = 0.75), with a smaller gap for recognizing famous people (d = 0.35). They describe the overall differences on the IQ test as negligible. In plain terms, d is the gap between the two group averages measured in standard deviations, so 0.1 is close to no gap and 0.75 is a moderate one, and the two groups still overlap heavily on the intelligence measures, though not on reading and writing, where the gaps were much larger. The same study found that students with dyslexia were slower on a speeded digit-crossing test (d = 0.6) and weaker on phonological short-term memory (d = 0.71), while other memory spans were close to those of the controls. The authors describe text comprehension as nearly equivalent for the two groups (d = 0.4) when the computer also read the text aloud, and they read this as suggesting that text-to-speech arrangements are useful while noting they lacked a direct comparison with and without them.

Two statements from the authors guard against over-reading this. They conclude that the vast majority of students entering higher education with a dyslexia diagnosis are the same as the other students apart from a language-related deficiency, and they add that all test scores tended to be lower for the dyslexic group, with a quite consistent deficiency on a wide range of tasks, predominantly those involving speed of processing and retrieval of verbal information from long-term memory. Both statements are true at once. The limits are also real: these were first-year students of about 19 who had reached higher education, a group the authors expect to be a select one, the sample spoke Dutch, one intelligence battery was used, and group averages do not predict what any one person will score.

For a dyslexic adult choosing a test, the translation is this, with the caution that the sample was students of about 19. Fluid intelligence, as the Dutch Kaufman test measured it, is the area where the study shows the smallest difference. Word retrieval, speed and phonological short-term memory are the areas where the gaps were larger in that sample. A single composite number blends all of them, which is why a profile of separate indices is more informative than one figure. The page on dyslexia and intelligence gives the wider research overview, and we do not repeat it here.

5 Can a dyslexic person have a high IQ?

Yes, because dyslexia is defined as a reading difficulty in people who otherwise have the intelligence needed for fluent reading, and a 2010 study found that reading and IQ develop more independently in dyslexic readers than in typical readers, though the sources we opened do not count how many dyslexic people score in any given IQ range. The 2010 study examined how reading and IQ development relate to each other over time. In typical readers, the authors report that reading and IQ development are dynamically linked over time. In dyslexic readers, such mutual links were not perceptible, which the authors say suggests that reading and cognition develop more independently in these individuals (Ferrer and colleagues, 2010). If reading level does not pull IQ along in dyslexia, then a struggling reader tells you less about reasoning than it would in someone who reads typically.

That is a statement about how the two develop, not a statistic on how many dyslexic adults are gifted, and we did not find a source we could open that supplies such a count. We therefore make no claim about the share of dyslexic people at any score. What we can say is narrower: nothing in the definition rules out a high score, and the authors of the 2012 student study say their data agree very well with the traditional definition of dyslexia as a combination of normal intelligence with difficulty in reading and writing.

A practical question arises at the top of the range: a person who reads slowly may reach the same answers by other means, such as strong reasoning or long effort, and a composite can hide the difference. The page on giftedness combined with a disability covers that profile, in which a high ability and a difficulty can mask each other. A composite built from five or six very different abilities averages a strength and a weakness into an ordinary looking figure, and how common a gap between index scores is is worth reading before deciding that a spread in your own profile means something unusual.

A caution on the other side: a high reasoning score does not show that someone is dyslexic, and a low one does not show that they are not. Reading and IQ are less tied together in dyslexia, so an IQ score cannot be used to confirm or exclude it in either direction. That is the practical meaning of the change we turn to next.

6 What happened to the IQ discrepancy model, and why does it matter for an adult looking at a test?

A 2002 meta-analysis found little evidence supporting the idea that a reading disability should be identified by a gap between IQ and reading, and current United States school regulations do not let a state require that gap, so a dyslexic adult has no reason to treat an IQ test as a diagnostic step. The analysis pooled 46 studies and asked whether poor readers classified as IQ-discrepant differ meaningfully from poor readers who are not. The aggregated effect sizes were in the negligible range for the behavior and achievement domains and in the small range for the cognitive ability domain (0.30), the last of which varied across studies and was largely explained by how the groups had been formed. The authors concluded that the results provide little evidence supporting the validity of the IQ-discrepancy classification and cast doubt on the need for IQ tests in identifying these students (Stuebing and colleagues, 2002).

The current federal regulation points the same way. The United States regulation on specific learning disabilities in public schools, 34 CFR 300.307, says a state must not require a severe discrepancy between intellectual ability and achievement to determine whether a child has a specific learning disability. It also says the state criteria must permit the use of a process based on the child's response to scientific, research-based intervention and may permit other alternative research-based procedures (eCFR, 34 CFR 300.307, read on October 28, 2026). That rule governs school eligibility for children, not adult assessment, and we cite it only to show where the discrepancy model stands in official practice.

Three consequences matter for the person reading this page. First, the 2002 paper describes the federal rule of its day as making children with reading difficulties eligible for special education when their reading skills were significantly lower than their IQ scores, so an IQ score was once an ingredient of school evaluations. Second, a normed IQ test taken today does not take the place of the assessment of reading and spelling that a professional would perform. Third, the old model's weakness is also a reason to keep two questions apart: whether you read fluently, and how your reasoning, vocabulary, memory and speed compare with other adults.

If you want the second question answered, you need a test whose structure lets you see the abilities separately. The ACIS report returns six index scores and a Full Scale IQ for the full battery, so a profile is available, and the later sections explain how to read it. The page on how IQ scores are normed explains what the comparison group means for any such score.

7 How much reading does each ACIS subtest ask for?

Of the 20 ACIS subtests, seven describe no verbal content in their items, three are heard as audio, six put words in the item or the answer, and four sit in between, so the reading load in the items runs from none to a typed written answer to a full question. The table below sorts all 20 using only what each subtest page or the technical manual states, read on October 28, 2026, with "not stated" where they are silent. It describes formats and never reproduces items. Time rules are given as the pages state them and can change.

The seven subtests with no verbal content described are Matrix Reasoning, Figure Weights, Layer Rotation, Visual Puzzles, Visual Sequence, Symbol Search and Coding. On the page for Matrix Reasoning the construct is fluid reasoning, and the technical manual says Layer Rotation carries no words at all because the instruction to turn is given by a tab on each layer, a format described on the page for Layer Rotation. The three audio subtests are Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing and Arithmetic. Their items are heard, so decoding print is not the barrier, but the next section explains why that does not make them neutral for a dyslexic adult.

Six subtests are the ones where words carry the item or the answer. Vocabulary, Information, Similarities and Complex Relations ask for a typed written answer, so spelling and typing sit inside the response, and Antonyms and Synonyms ask you to read single words and options. The page on a test built on word knowledge covers that style of test on its own. The four in between are Visual Number Series, Logic Grid, Mathematical Achievement and Spatial Comprehension, where the items are numbers, shapes or diagrams but typed answers, short instructions or a study sheet of terms still appear. Quantitative content sits mostly in the QRI row and in Visual Number Series, and tests that avoid calculation are a separate decision from the reading question.

8 Does removing the reading remove the other demands, and what do timing, typing and audio add?

Taking the words out of an item removes one demand, not all of them: the audio subtests draw on auditory working memory, the timed subtests reward speed, and the typed subtests put spelling inside the answer, and the 2012 study found group differences on skills related to each of these. That study measured a gap in phonological short-term memory (d = 0.71) that was larger than the gap on fluid intelligence (d = 0.1). The technical manual describes Digit Span as depending on attention, phonological encoding and serial maintenance, so a subtest that spares a dyslexic adult from reading can still draw on a skill related to the one that study measured. The match is loose: the task in that study used sequences of phonemes, not digits, and its other memory spans, including reproducing letters or digits in ascending order, showed smaller gaps (d from 0.28 to 0.45). Arithmetic adds mental calculation, where the same study found a cost on a timed test (d = 1 for the total number of operations). We do not know how dyslexic adults perform on the ACIS audio subtests, and we say so rather than imply the reverse. The Digit Span page and the manual are the places to read what each audio subtest is meant to capture.

Speed is the second item. The 2012 study found students with dyslexia slower on a speeded digit-crossing test (d = 0.6), a different task from anything in ACIS, so the number does not transfer. What transfers is the design lesson: a speeded subtest is a measure of the speed of a simple operation, and the page for Coding says speed is the part of a profile that shifts most over a lifetime and that the subtest is read with caution because speed, attention, motor fluency, visual efficiency and comfort with timed performance can all matter. The processing speed guide explains how that domain is interpreted. The technical manual adds a practical note: speeded tasks can be affected by input latency, screen size, visual clarity, distraction, fatigue and motivation, and working memory tasks can be affected by audio conditions and attention.

The third item is typing. Vocabulary, Information, Similarities, Complex Relations, Visual Number Series, Alphanumeric Sequencing, Digit Span, Arithmetic and part of Spatial Comprehension ask you to enter text or numbers. For Vocabulary the manual says credit depends on the precision and completeness of the definition, and for Similarities it describes graded credit for a category that captures both items. None of the pages we read says how spelling is treated in scoring, so we write "not stated" and we do not guess. A dyslexic adult who spells with difficulty should know that the pages are silent, and that the free trial opens only some of the subtests, so it may not include the typed verbal ones. Weigh that unknown before paying.

The last item is the clock. Several typed subtests advance on their own when the time runs out, which the pages state, so a slow typist or a slow reader loses the item, not just time. The pages for adults with ADHD and autistic adults raise parallel questions about attention and format for other profiles, and the same rule applies there: ask what the subtest demands before asking whether the test is friendly.

9 How should a dyslexic adult read the scores?

Read a profile of separate scores with its confidence interval, not one number, because the reason a score is low matters more than the score and a single subtest is the least precise thing the report contains. The ACIS report uses the standard scale for the Full Scale IQ and the six indices (mean 100, standard deviation 15) and scaled scores from 1 to 19 for each subtest (mean 10, standard deviation 3), with percentiles and a 95 percent confidence interval. The page on the six cognitive domains in IQ testing explains what each index covers, and the page on reliability and validity explains why a confidence interval exists at all.

Precision rises with the number of subtests behind a score. The technical manual says a score derived from 20 subtests can support broader language than one derived from a single task, and that a professional report should avoid wording such as an exact IQ or a precise rank when the score is based on a narrow indicator. For a dyslexic reader this is protective. A single typed subtest that went badly because of spelling, or an audio subtest affected by a noisy room, should not be read as a verdict on a whole domain. Read the index, then the subtests inside it, then ask whether the pattern fits what you know about yourself.

The manual also lists composites built from fixed sets of subtests, available when their subtests are available. One of them, the Nonverbal Index (NVI), "emphasizes nonverbal reasoning, visual spatial ability, working memory, and speed with minimal reliance on verbal content," in the manual's words, and the VKI composite "combines Antonyms, Synonyms, Vocabulary, and Information." The CPI composite "combines working memory and processing speed as cognitive proficiency." Which of these appears for you depends on which subtests you complete. These composites let a reader compare a language-light view with a knowledge view, and the page on how the general ability index is built and read explains a related idea, a composite that sets some abilities aside, in general terms.

Two warnings apply. First, a pattern such as a lower verbal index and a lower speed index beside a higher fluid reasoning index does not show dyslexia. It appears in many histories, including limited English exposure and little schooling, and the group differences described above say nothing about any one person. Second, the report is not a screening tool for reading disorders, and no index score is a diagnostic signal. If a pattern raises a question about reading, the person to ask is a qualified professional who can test reading and spelling directly.

10 What conditions make an unsupervised session fairer?

Fairness in an unsupervised session comes from controlling what you can control, the device, the sound, the room and the schedule, and from not adding helpers or tools that change what the score means. The ACIS home page says breaks are allowed, progress is saved between subtests, and you have 30 days to complete a form, so a long form does not need to be one sitting. That matters for a reader who tires, and it is the main flexibility the platform states.

Start with the sound, because three subtests need it. Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing and Arithmetic present items as audio and need working sound, and the Digit Span page tells you the numbers play at one per second and suggests headphones or a quiet space. Test the audio before you start, in a quiet room. Check the screen next: two speeded subtests, Symbol Search and Coding, stay locked to landscape on a phone so every symbol remains visible. Several pages say a few practice items come first and are not scored, so use them to get used to the format.

About presentation settings, we can say little with confidence. The letter spacing study and the font study both used children, and the first found a benefit from extra spacing while the second found none from a specialized typeface. The ACIS pages we read do not describe any option to change the font, spacing or colors, so we do not claim one. Your browser's zoom and your device's own settings are in your control, and nothing in the evidence tells us which of them helps an adult reading a test item.

Aids are where fairness and standardization pull against each other. The ACIS instructions say no external aids, naming calculators, notes, scratch paper and drawing tools, with Mathematical Achievement as the stated exception that allows pen and scratch paper. That page also says outside assistance is not allowed, and the other pages we read do not mention a reader or a screen reader. A person reading questions aloud, or a screen reader, changes who or what delivers the item. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing say test takers should receive comparable treatment and that standardized procedures should be followed so scores reflect the construct, and that unproctored administrations, where standardization cannot be ensured, call for caution in interpretation. They also say accommodations such as readers belong to a documented process: an accommodation should be used only when the test taker has a documented need, and those responsible must document how it is provided and monitor its use. An online test cannot supply that process. The Standards also give a close example: a screen reader for a dyslexic student on a reading comprehension test changes the construct when decoding is part of it, though it may support more valid interpretations when the purpose is comprehension without concern for decoding. A result obtained with a reader or a screen reader falls outside the standardized conditions and should not be treated as comparable with a standard administration, and if reading support is what you need, that is a question for a qualified professional.

The page on what culture-fair tests can and cannot remove makes a parallel point: lowering the language load reduces one source of difference without removing the influence of background or familiarity, and the same is true of reading.

11 Which ACIS form fits, and what does the free trial offer?

The choice among Quick, Optimized, Full Scale and Custom Test is a choice about coverage and cost, and for a dyslexic reader it is also a choice about how many typed and word-based subtests sit in the set. The prices below were read on the ACIS home page on October 28, 2026 and can change. All are one time payments with no subscription, every form reports a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval, and Full Scale measures all 20 subtests.

• Quick, 15 dollars, about 45 minutes. Six subtests in three domains: Similarities, Vocabulary, Matrix Reasoning, Figure Weights, Digit Span and Alphanumeric Sequencing. Two are typed verbal tasks, two are heard, two have no verbal content described.
• Optimized, 30 dollars, about 110 minutes. Thirteen subtests in five domains: Vocabulary, Antonyms, Similarities, Synonyms, Matrix Reasoning, Figure Weights, Logic Grid, Spatial Comprehension, Layer Rotation, Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing, Coding and Symbol Search. Four are verbal, and the rest are reasoning, visual, memory and speed tasks.
• Full Scale, 50 dollars, about 175 minutes. All 20 subtests in six domains. Seven are only in this form: Information, Arithmetic, Mathematical Achievement, Visual Number Series, Complex Relations, Visual Puzzles and Visual Sequence.
• Custom Test, 5 dollars per subtest. You choose the subtests. Any domain you complete returns its full index score, and every subtest returns its scaled score. The Full Scale IQ needs the Full Scale battery, and at 10 subtests the Full Scale form costs the same.

Choosing a Custom Test set to leave out the formats that are hard for you is possible, but we do not recommend it as a general approach, because skipping a domain also skips the information it would give. It is an option for a reader who wants a specific piece of the profile.

The free trial needs no card, and the site allows one free trial per person, refusing a second from the same email address or the same browser. Subtests finished in the trial are kept if you later unlock a form that includes them. The trial opens only some of the subtests, so compare the reading load of the ones it opens with the table above, and remember that the typed verbal subtests may not be among them. The guarantee is a conditional refund, quoted literally: "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." Example reports are linked in the boxes on this page.

The page on how an adult chooses and reads an IQ test covers the wider decision between routes.

12 Where ACIS sits, and what a buyer should do

ACIS is a normed online test of adult cognitive abilities for personal use, and its strengths and its limits are the same fact: it is online, unsupervised, in English and not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, and it makes no claim about how dyslexic adults perform on it. It has 20 subtests in six CHC domains, reported as a Full Scale IQ and six primary indices, with adult norms for ages 16 to 90. It is not for hiring, for school accommodations or for admission to high IQ societies, and it cannot say whether you have dyslexia, ADHD or any other condition. Its documentation is in the ACIS technical manual, which we link and do not quote for any statistic.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) give the reading rules this page has used. They say those responsible should design every step of testing to promote valid score interpretations for the widest possible range of individuals, with tasks and items free of construct-irrelevant barriers as far as possible (Standard 3.1). They say developers who claim a test can be used with specific subgroups are responsible for supporting evidence (Standard 3.15), and ACIS has not claimed that for dyslexic adults, which is why this page does not call it dyslexia friendly. They say accommodations should be used only where there is a documented need and that the documentation should be reviewed by qualified experts (Standard 3.10). And they say that unproctored administrations, where standardization cannot be ensured, call for caution in interpreting results (Standard 3.4). The APA's Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation (2020) add that psychologists strive to select the most appropriate test for a specific purpose and that disability is among the forms of human diversity to be recognized in decisions regarding service delivery, which is why we point to a clinical evaluation when the purpose is diagnosis or accommodations.

What a buyer should do is concrete. Decide your purpose first. If it is a diagnosis or accommodations, see the route on the page about neuropsychological testing and do not use an online score. If it is to see how your reasoning, vocabulary, memory and speed compare with adults, read the subtest pages for the abilities you care most about, look at the table in this guide, start the free trial with no card, and read the example report to see what the output looks like. Take sessions when you are rested, use headphones or a quiet space for the audio subtests, and note anything that disturbed a session. When the report arrives, read the profile, not the headline number, and treat any surprising result as a question for a retake or a professional, not as a conclusion.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every third party fact and figure on this page comes from the documents below, opened or verified on October 28, 2026, and any figure we derived ourselves is labeled in the text. ACIS facts come from the ACIS pages read that day, and prices can change.

1. American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education (2014). Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington, DC: AERA. Open access edition read October 28, 2026: https://www.testingstandards.net/open-access-files.html
2. American Psychological Association (2020). APA Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation. Approved by the APA Council of Representatives, March 2020. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-psychological-assessment-evaluation.pdf
3. Callens, M., Tops, W., and Brysbaert, M. (2012). Cognitive Profile of Students Who Enter Higher Education with an Indication of Dyslexia. PLoS ONE, 7(6), e38081. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038081
4. Ferrer, E., Shaywitz, B. A., Holahan, J. M., Marchione, K., and Shaywitz, S. E. (2010). Uncoupling of Reading and IQ Over Time. Psychological Science, 21(1), 93 to 101. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609354084
5. Pearson Clinical Assessment. Table 2. WAIS-IV Subtest Input and Output Requirements and Equivalence Evidence (telepractice resource for the WAIS-IV). Undated document; the file metadata shows October 21, 2020. Read October 28, 2026: https://www.pearsonclinical.ca/content/dam/school/global/clinical/us/assets/wais-iv/wais-iv-telepractice-table-2.pdf
6. Stuebing, K. K., Fletcher, J. M., LeDoux, J. M., Lyon, G. R., Shaywitz, S. E., and Shaywitz, B. A. (2002). Validity of IQ-Discrepancy Classifications of Reading Disabilities: A Meta-Analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 39(2), 469 to 518. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312039002469
7. U.S. Department of Education. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 34, section 300.307, Specific learning disabilities, current text read October 28, 2026 (latest issue date October 26, 2026). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-III/part-300/subpart-D/section-300.307
8. Wery, J. J., and Diliberto, J. A. (2017). The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of Dyslexia, 67(2), 114 to 127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-016-0127-1
9. Zorzi, M., Barbiero, C., Facoetti, A., Lonciari, I., Carrozzi, M., Montico, M., Bravar, L., George, F., Pech-Georgel, C., and Ziegler, J. C. (2012). Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(28), 11455 to 11459. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1205566109

14 Frequently Asked Questions