RIOT IQ test reviewed from its own pages: plans, norms and what the margin covers

0 The short answer

RIOT IQ is a documented paid online battery for United States born native English speakers, and by the one outside analysis we found its overall IQ has more public support than its six index scores. On October 6, 2026 its Full plan cost 50 dollars with a printed margin of plus or minus 3.7 IQ points, its Basic plan cost 25 dollars with plus or minus 5.6, and its public technical documentation was a six page bulletin, with a longer manual available on request. That analysis, by Christopher Jacobs, a researcher who states that he is unaffiliated with RIOT, supports a strong general factor and questions whether three of the six index scores measure separate abilities, but it is a single author report posted on Zenodo with no peer review statement and it rests on summary statistics. We sell a competing assessment, so every figure here is dated and traceable to a page or document we opened.

1 What Is RIOT IQ, and Who Stands Behind It?

RIOT is a commercial online intelligence test whose terms name PSYCH LABS, LLC as the contracting company and whose design is led by a named psychologist, Russell T. Warne. The name stands for Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test. The terms of service, last modified August 26, 2025, describe a contract between the user and PSYCH LABS, LLC. The about page presents Warne as chief scientist and says he has written over 60 scholarly articles and two books published by Cambridge University Press. It also lists two research assistants, one credited with item creation, test design and research support and one leading marketing and partnerships, plus a chief technology officer and several design, illustration and support roles. According to Jacobs, the test launched on July 18, 2025, a date he takes from a RIOT announcement.

The home page calls RIOT the first professional online IQ test, says it rests on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model of intelligence, and says it meets testing standards from the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education. Those are RIOT's claims about itself, and later sections look at what is documented. The home page also lists a sensitivity review panel of seven named academics who review items for fairness.

RIOT states its own scope in an article dated February 21, 2025. It calls the test ideal for low to moderate stakes assessments, says it is not for high stakes scenarios, and says it is not appropriate for diagnosing a disability. Its technical bulletin, last updated August 26, 2025, adds that the test is designed to measure intelligence in American adults who were born in the United States and speak English as a native language, and that scores may be less accurate for other examinees. The page on professional versus online IQ tests explains why that boundary exists.

RIOT also sells through research channels. Prolific's marketplace listing, read on October 6, 2026, labels Riot IQ a Premier Marketplace Partner, the page of the International Society for Intelligence Research offers its members 1,000 free RIOT assessments for research projects, and RIOT's platform page calls its testing platform free for psychologists, clinicians, researchers and institutions, while its administrator terms say services are provided per test at the fees specified at purchase. These are facts about distribution, not score quality, and a research purchase is a different decision from a personal one. ACIS has its own page for researchers.

2 What Do the RIOT Plans Cost, and What Does Each Include?

On October 6, 2026 RIOT sold four routes, and the cheapest paid route and the dearest differ in subtests, margin and time as well as in price. The table below comes from the home page and the pages for the Full plan, the Basic plan, the Custom plan and the free test, each read that day.

The Full and Basic pages label their lower prices an early access discount, and we saw no end date on either. The struck through figures are list prices that RIOT displays, and the pages do not say that anyone paid them. Our own arithmetic shows how the Custom plan prices out. Five subtests cost 50 dollars, the same as Full and twice Basic, and all 15 cost 150 dollars, the struck through Full price. Custom returns an overall IQ only if the buyer includes at least one subtest from each of the Verbal Reasoning, Fluid Reasoning and Spatial Ability indices, so the cheapest Custom test that returns one costs 30 dollars.

The Basic and Full pages carry a "Try it free" button, and the home page says a buyer can start a few subtests of the most comprehensive assessment for free and continue when ready. The free test is a separate three subtest product whose page says its report is less robust than the paid Full report. We did not start either, so we cannot report how the payment prompt appears. A Trustpilot reviewer wrote on February 7, 2026 that the company lies about the first free test and forces a purchase to continue, and a reviewer on July 17, 2025 wrote that they took the free version and were a bit down that the test has a pay scale. Those are reviewers' words, and the plan pages show the free route and the paid route side by side.

The terms describe payments to complete a RIOT test and to use the services, and they mention no subscription or recurring charge, which is an absence we report as an absence. A popup on two of the pages we opened on October 6, 2026 also offered a welcome code for 25 percent off, sent by direct message on Reddit to first time test takers who join the r/RiotIQTest community within 24 hours, without naming the plans it covers. The guide to how much an IQ test costs and the page on billing models for paid IQ tests place these terms beside the rest of the market.

3 What Do the RIOT Subtests Ask, and What Does Each Plan Leave Out?

The Full plan administers 15 subtests across six indices, the Basic plan keeps one subtest from each of five indices, and the Custom plan sells subtests one at a time. RIOT describes the formats in an article on the 15 subtests and lists the index membership in its bulletin. This page describes formats and reproduces no items from any test. The six indices are Verbal Reasoning, Fluid Reasoning, Spatial Ability, Working Memory, Processing Speed and Reaction Time, and the page on cognitive domains explains how such indices map onto the broad abilities of the CHC model.

Several points follow from the table. The Basic plan omits ten of the 15 subtests, the whole Reaction Time index, and the remaining subtests of each index it samples. Its page says the report gives IQ and T-scores for four of the five broad abilities, while the header of the same page says five T-scores, and we could not tell from public pages which statement applies. RIOT's own documents also count the indices inconsistently, because the bulletin and the February 21, 2025 article say five index scores, while the plan pages and the bulletin's own table list six. Reaction Time is one subtest with two scored portions, which is how 15 subtests produce 16 subscores. RIOT's article says the number of reaction time trials is lower than the literature recommends, a choice it explains as a way to limit boredom.

Six of the subtest names also exist in the ACIS battery: Vocabulary, Information, Matrix Reasoning, Figure Weights, Visual Puzzles and Symbol Search. A shared name describes a task family and does not make two subtests interchangeable, because items, time limits, scoring and norms differ. The page on what each subtest type measures explains the families without tying them to a vendor.

4 How Should You Read RIOT's Plus or Minus 3.7 Margin of Error?

RIOT's margin of error describes how consistent its items are within one sitting, so it bounds item sampling error and leaves other sources of difference between a first score and a second unmeasured. The plan pages print plus or minus 3.7 IQ points for Full, 5.6 for Basic and 14.9 for the free test, and the free test page tags itself with the words "High margin of error". The pages we read do not name a confidence level. The usual construction is a 95 percent interval equal to 1.96 times the scale standard deviation times the square root of one minus the reliability. Jacobs reports that RIOT's scoring code uses this construction with the reliability of a weighted composite, and the page on reliability and validity explains why the construction is standard. Our arithmetic runs the formula backward to show what each printed margin would require.

The Full figure matches the omega of .984 in the bulletin, because 1.96 times 15 times the square root of one minus .984 comes to 3.7. For Basic and the free test we found no published coefficient to check, so the implied values show only what those margins would require under the formula. In practice a Full score of 110 sits in a band of about 106 to 114 on RIOT's own number, a Basic score of 110 in a band of about 104 to 116, and a free test score of 110 in a band of about 95 to 125. The guide to the standard deviation of 15 shows why a band of 30 points spans several descriptive categories of the IQ score chart.

Three things sit outside the margin. The first is time. The technical bulletin reports internal consistency only, and Jacobs states that no test-retest reliability has been published. RIOT's manual page lists a test-retest section among its chapters, and the manual itself is available on request, so we could not read that section. A RIOT article from September 26, 2026 reports stability figures for other instruments and, as we read it, none for RIOT. The same article describes the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing as treating internal consistency, alternate form and test-retest coefficients as three broad families of reliability evidence.

The second is practice. The same RIOT article says that the meta-analysis of Scharfen, Peters and Holling pooled 122 studies with 153,185 participants and found a gain from the first to the second administration of about a third of a standard deviation, with a 95 percent interval from 0.28 to 0.38, which the article puts at roughly five points on the 15 point scale. The article adds that the gain is larger when the identical form is reused than when an alternate form is used. We quote these figures from RIOT's article and did not open the full paper. RIOT's flag system includes a Retake flag for previous exposure within a specified timeframe, and RIOT says flags do not alter the score. We found no stated retake rule or retake price on the plan pages or in the terms. The page on preparing for an IQ test separates legitimate preparation from contamination.

The third is the reference group, which the next section takes up. A margin also says nothing about agreement with a clinician administered test, and the bulletin reports no correlation between RIOT and another intelligence test. Trustpilot reviewers disagree on this, each unverifiably, and two instruments with their own error and norm groups will not agree exactly.

5 Who Is the 100? What RIOT Says About Its Norm Group

RIOT compares you with United States born native English speakers aged 18 and older, and its documents describe the size of that group in two different ways. The plan pages place a statement under the heading Norms: a representative sample of 1,620 native English speaking adults born in the United States. The home page, read on October 6, 2026, says the test is normed for native English speakers aged 18 and older, born and residing in the United States. RIOT's pages differ on the free test. Its own page lists norms from volunteers who took the free test online, while the home page says that all RIOT tests, including the free one, use the same norms. We report both and do not choose between them.

The bulletin draws a distinction the plan pages do not. It says the final norm sample consists of 417 individuals who are nationally representative of the target population in sex, age, race and ethnicity, and education. It describes its Stage 3 tryout sample of 1,620 individuals as a representative sample of English speaking American adults born in the United States, and says that for some analyses the norm sample is supplemented with data from that tryout sample. The two statements may be reconcilable, but the bulletin does not say which analyses use the tryout data. We therefore report both numbers and do not choose between them.

The bulletin also leaves out what a reader would need to assess representativeness. Jacobs notes that it gives no demographic breakdown, no recruitment method and no stratification procedure for the 417. He reports, from tables he reconstructed, that the norm tables use three age brackets: 18 to 39, 40 to 59 and 60 and older.

In its February 21, 2025 article RIOT writes that no other publicly available online test has a representative norm sample, a comparative claim we have not tested and do not adopt. For readers outside its target group, RIOT does document the limit. The bulletin says scores may be less accurate for other populations, and its flags include a Language flag and a Non-Normed Population flag. The report also compares you with other RIOT test-takers, a different group from the norm group, and the page on test bias explains why the distinction matters.

6 What Does the RIOT Report Show Before You Pay?

RIOT publishes a sample Full report, and what it shows is an IQ score with a margin, six T-scored indices with their own margins, a percentile phrased as a top share and a notice of abnormalities. The example report is linked from the Full plan page. Its banner says it is an example of the Full IQ test report and does not reflect the reader's score. The overview showed an IQ score of 124 with a margin of 3.7 and a percentile worded as the top 5.5 percent, a test time of 42 minutes and 29 seconds, and a notice that four abnormalities were encountered during the test. Only the overview loaded with data in our read, so we cannot describe the subtest level screens.

The six index results in the example are reported as T-scores, which have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, and not on the IQ metric of 100 and 15. The example shows Working Memory at 76 with a margin of 6.0, Processing Speed at 64 with 3.2, Fluid Reasoning at 62 with 4.3, Spatial Ability at 61 with 4.3, Verbal Reasoning at 58 with 3.5 and Reaction Time at 56 with 4.3. The index margins therefore run from 3.2 to 6.0, and the widest belongs to Working Memory. The page on percentiles and scores explains why a percentile and a score are not interchangeable.

Score range

RIOT states the span of its scale in two places that do not match exactly, and Jacobs reads a third figure in code. The home page, read on October 6, 2026, says the test is designed to measure IQ scores between 75 and 145 accurately, with T-scores from 34 to 80, and that scores outside the range may be extrapolated and are approximations, especially when they exceed the range by more than 5 to 10 points. RIOT's February 21, 2025 article says global IQ scores range from 70 to about 145 and index scores from 30 to 80. Jacobs reports reading hard limits of 71 and 145 on the overall IQ, and T-scores of 31 to 80, in public site code, and he recommends widening them. We did not inspect that code. A score of 145 is three standard deviations above 100, our arithmetic, so a reader who expects to land near the top of the distribution should read the page on high range testing before paying for any battery with a stated limit.

Flags and what unsupervised means

RIOT's article on test flags, dated June 8, 2025, lists nine flags: Low IQ Score, Low Subtest Scores, Language, Non-Normed Population, Retake, Subtest Window Inactive, Subtests Exited, Highly Rapid Responses and Excessive Reaction Time Trials Repeated. It says most examinees are expected to take the RIOT without supervision, which raises the risk of cheating and other behavior that threatens the trustworthiness of scores. It also says a flag does not alter the score, is shown for information only, and leaves the decision about invalidating a score to the reader of the report. Those choices are transparent, and they put the interpretive burden on the reader.

Unsupervised testing has a measurable cost, and ACIS is also online and unsupervised, so the point applies to both products. The meta-analysis of Steger, Schroeders and Gnambs pooled 109 effect sizes from 49 studies with 100,434 participants and found that scores were higher in unproctored than in proctored assessments, with a pooled difference of 0.20 standard deviations and a 95 percent interval from 0.10 to 0.31. On a 15 point scale, 0.20 standard deviations is about three points, our arithmetic. American Mensa's qualifying scores page, read on October 6, 2026, says it does not accept unsupervised testing as proof of eligibility, including electronically administered tests. By its plain reading, a RIOT result is not a route into that society.

7 How Long Does the RIOT IQ Test Take?

RIOT gives the duration of its Full test in five separate statements across its own pages, from about 52 minutes to as many as 100, and the shortest stated figure is the one on the Full plan page. The figures below were read or dated as shown, and the example report adds one observed session.

The bulletin says its range includes instructions, and the plan page does not say what its 52 minutes includes. The top of the bulletin range is almost twice the plan page figure, our arithmetic. We have not taken the test or timed it, and the pages do not explain the gap, so we cannot say which figure matches a typical session. The page on how long an IQ test takes lists times by instrument for comparison.

Individual subtests carry short clocks, and Jacobs lists Symbol Search as a speeded two minute task and each Reaction Time portion as 20 trials. Several RIOT subtests therefore measure speed as well as accuracy, and the page on why IQ tests are timed explains what a clock adds to a score. The bulletin says subtests can be taken in any order with breaks between them, and the Full page says a buyer can take breaks and resume at any time.

The ACIS home page, read on October 6, 2026, gives about 45 minutes for the Quick form, about 110 minutes for the Optimized form and about 175 minutes for the Full Scale form, with breaks allowed and 30 days to complete. The Full Scale form therefore takes more than three times as long as the RIOT Full plan page states, our arithmetic. Time is not quality, and what the extra time buys is coverage, because ACIS administers 20 subtests against RIOT's 15.

8 What Evidence Does RIOT Publish for Its Scores?

RIOT publishes a six page bulletin openly and describes a manual of more than 100 pages that it releases on request, so the public evidence is real and summary level. The manual page says the manual covers theory, development, technical properties, scoring and interpretation, includes example items and statistical tables, and is primarily intended for researchers and clinicians. Its "See preview" button opens the Informational Bulletin, RIOT Technical Report No. 2025-01 by Warne, last updated August 26, 2025. What that bulletin reports is summarized below.

The validity figures rest on self-reported educational data from the tryout sample, the bulletin says studies are planned to gather verified data, and it does not state how many people stand behind each correlation. Its bias section also notes weak evidence of better prediction of self-reported grades for females and slightly worse prediction for Hispanic examinees, and says the prediction errors are trivial and that none of that evidence survives correction for multiple tests. The bulletin does not report a correlation between RIOT and any other intelligence test, a test-retest coefficient, the demographic composition of the norm sample, item counts, or the tables that convert raw scores to scaled scores. Those are absences from a six page summary and not evidence that the analyses do not exist, because the manual page lists chapters on reliability, validity and fairness that we could not read.

RIOT also made a transparency pledge. Its February 21, 2025 article said the team would make the test data and analysis code freely available so that experts could audit it. The manual page lists a chapter on open code and data. We found no download of data or code on the pages we opened, and Jacobs states that as of August 2026 none had been released beyond the bulletin and that the full manual remained behind a request process. We report both observations without inferring intent, since a pledge can be met later.

On peer review, Crossref confirms an article by Warne in Intelligence, volume 115, article 101990, 2026, titled "Heterogeneous relationships between working speed and ability on the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test (RIOT)", and RIOT's site links it under Research. Jacobs describes it as the lone peer reviewed study using RIOT data and says it addresses response speed modeling and not the validation of RIOT scores. We could not read the article, because the publisher page presented a verification challenge, and we did not try to bypass it.

RIOT's own article of December 4, 2025 gives buyers a checklist for online tests: a creator with disclosed credentials, a representative norm sample, documented psychometric properties, adherence to professional standards, and evaluation by outside experts that shows up in peer reviewed research. Applied to RIOT, the creator is named, the norm sample is described in summary only, the documentation exists in summary form, and outside evaluation consists of one third party report posted without a peer review statement. That is a mixed result, and it applies RIOT's own yardstick to RIOT.

9 What Did the Jacobs Analysis Find, and Where Does It Stop?

A single author report posted on August 21, 2026 reproduces RIOT's published model and then argues that three of the six index scores are not separable, and it is best read as one analyst's account with stated limits. The report is by Christopher G. Jacobs, who states that he is unaffiliated with RIOT IQ. It was deposited on Zenodo on August 21, 2026 as a report under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and the record gives no peer review statement. The report says AI assistance was used to draft and edit its prose and that the analysis and conclusions are the author's. Its data are the bulletin plus what Jacobs describes as public client side browser code, from which he says the norm tables, subtest correlations and factor loadings can be reconstructed. He had no individual level data. We did not inspect that code, so we cannot confirm his reconstruction.

The report supports RIOT on one point and questions it on another. His reproduction matches RIOT's published fit statistics closely, and 19 of 22 standardized loadings agree to two decimals, so the bulletin's model reproduces from the reconstructed correlations. He concludes that RIOT measures a strong general factor, citing a first eigenvalue of 6.34, more than four times the second. He then reports that parallel analysis and the Bayesian information criterion favored four factors: Verbal, Reaction Time, Processing Speed and one merged factor holding the nine Fluid Reasoning, Spatial Ability and Working Memory subtests. He concludes that the evidence gives considerably more confidence in the overall IQ and in the Verbal, Processing Speed and Reaction Time indices than in the Fluid, Spatial and Working Memory indices. The page on the g factor explains why a strong general factor and weak group factors can coexist.

His recommendations are specific: rebuild the Working Memory index from the start, replace Abstract Matching, move Visual Puzzles from Fluid Reasoning to Spatial Ability, widen or remove the limits on composite scores, and publish the manual, data and code. He reads Visual Reversal, the Working Memory subtest in the Basic plan, as behaving mainly like a spatial task. On Reaction Time he notes a correlation of .73 between the simple and choice portions and suggests that device and browser differences could add shared error. Browser timing is not unusable in general, since Anwyl-Irvine and colleagues tested four web platforms across browsers and operating systems and found reasonable accuracy and precision for display duration and manual response time. RIOT describes its platform as custom built, so that result does not transfer automatically.

The limits matter as much as the findings. Jacobs says his analysis rests on summary level statistics, that item level analysis would plausibly surface more problems, and that he cannot check norms or test-retest data or compare RIOT with other measures. He calls the four factor model informed by the exploratory analysis and fits it to the same subtest correlation matrix that the exploratory analysis used, so its better fit is not a replication, which is our reading and not his claim. In fairness to the model, he notes that it uses one fewer free parameter, so its advantage is not due to added complexity. His own table also shows overlapping 90 percent intervals for RMSEA, from .049 to .068 for the six factor model and from .038 to .058 for the four factor model. We found no published reply from RIOT in its article menus or by web search on October 6, 2026, which is a statement about our search. For a buyer the reading is narrow: the overall IQ has the stronger support in this analysis, and the Fluid, Spatial and Working Memory index scores have the least, so they deserve the most caution.

10 What Do RIOT's Terms Say About Refunds, and What Do Buyers Report?

RIOT's terms make payments generally non-refundable with discretionary exceptions, and its public ratings are small, split and unverified. The terms of service, last modified August 26, 2025 and read on October 6, 2026, state under Payments: "All payments are generally non-refundable and non-transferable." They add that exceptions may be granted at RIOT's discretion for failure to deliver the services or when applicable law requires. They reserve the right to correct pricing errors and to cancel orders that arise from them, and they say a violation of the terms ends the account without a refund. A user may end the agreement by deleting the account.

Other clauses bear on a purchase. The terms describe the services as informational and say they should not be used as the basis for critical assessments or decisions. They cap RIOT's total liability at the amount paid in the previous twelve months or, if greater, fifty dollars. Disputes go to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association, with a class action waiver and a 30 day opt out by email. Eligibility is limited to users aged 18 and older.

One Trustpilot reviewer wrote on July 20, 2025 that RIOT offers refunds if a buyer is not happy with the experience. We found no refund guarantee on the plan pages or in the terms, where the general rule is the reverse. The support page says email gets a reply within 48 hours, so if a refund matters, ask in writing before paying and keep the answer. A reviewer's description is not a term of the contract. The plan pages, FAQ and terms we read also mention no certificate, and the guide to IQ test certificates covers the same question.

Public ratings are small. The Trustpilot profile showed a TrustScore of 3.5 from 27 reviews on October 6, 2026, with the profile claimed in January 2025, 70 percent of ratings at five stars and 15 percent at one star. Nine reviews fell in the last 12 months, and the company replied to 25 percent of negative reviews. Trustpilot itself says it does not fact check reviews. RIOT's home page displays a rating of 4.9 on a five point scale beside ten Google reviews dated from August 2025 to April 2026 and gives no total count. Both are small, and neither measures accuracy.

The complaints on Trustpilot cluster in four places, and each is a reviewer's claim: the free offer, agreement with a psychologist administered test, documentation and norms, and trust. A reviewer wrote in December 2025 that the test lacks proper psychometric data compared with the WAIS-IV, and a September 2026 reviewer wrote that the norm claim is overstated and that the test is overpriced next to free alternatives. At least one review uses the word scam. Our reading of the plan pages and terms found prices and terms stated openly, and we did not buy anything, so we cannot report on checkout or billing behavior. Praise centers on the interface and the breakdown of results, and several reviewers say the score fit their prior testing or record.

RIOT answers in public. A reply dated December 11, 2025 says RIOT was never going to be a free project, that it is free for many research groups, and that revenue funds the full time work of Warne and the team. Replies in July 2025 say some negative reviews are not based on a genuine experience, and we cannot verify either side. RIOT's February 21, 2025 article says new questions will be added to the test and old ones retired, and its plan pages name version 1.0 (2025). A buyer should therefore record the date of testing, because a result from 2025 and one from 2026 may rest on different items.

11 How Much Does RIOT Cost Over 12 Months, and Who Does Each Option Fit?

Both RIOT and ACIS charge once per purchase with no subscription stated, so the twelve month cost equals what you buy, and the choice turns on what each purchase measures. The ACIS prices were read on the home page on October 6, 2026, and the RIOT prices on the pages cited above. Both change.

Two further points affect the total. The Custom plan costs the same as Full at five subtests and the same as the struck through Full list price at all 15, so it costs less than Full only below five subtests. And a retake has no stated price or rule in the RIOT documents we read, so a second sitting inside the year is an open cost. The price breakdown of IQ tests places both against the market, and the page on the paid IQ test explains why a one time charge differs from a subscription.

The table below sets the situations readers bring against what the documents support. It does not rank the two products, because no study compares them.

The last table lists what cannot be stated from public documents, which is as important as what can.

12 Where ACIS Sits, and What a Buyer Should Do

We sell ACIS, which competes with RIOT for the same buyer, so ACIS should be judged by the checks applied to RIOT above, and its limits are stated here as plainly as its strengths. ACIS administers 20 subtests across six cognitive domains and reports a Full Scale IQ and six primary indices: verbal comprehension, fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual spatial, working memory and processing speed. The report gives percentiles and a 95 percent confidence interval, with subtest scores on a scale from 1 to 19, and adult norms cover ages 16 to 90. The three forms cost 15, 30 and 50 dollars on October 6, 2026, payment is one time with no subscription, breaks are allowed, a free trial needs no card, a quality guarantee runs five days, and a purchase gives 30 days to finish. The technical manual holds the documentation, and this page quotes no figure from it, so apply to it the questions this page applied to RIOT's bulletin.

The limits are real. ACIS is online and unsupervised, so identity, environment and adherence to instructions cannot be verified. It is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument. It is not for hiring, school accommodations or admission to high IQ societies. It is English only. On documented points RIOT is ahead in several ways: a development team led by a named psychologist, a public bulletin with reliability, model fit and criterion figures, one peer reviewed article by its chief scientist, a free professional platform, a shorter Full test, and a margin printed on its Full, Basic and free pages. ACIS differs in content, with 20 subtests, a quantitative reasoning index that RIOT does not report, and no reaction time index. Those are differences of content and scope, not proof of accuracy either way.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) are the framework that RIOT cites for itself and against which any online test can be read. RIOT's own article of December 4, 2025 summarizes the central idea, that validity is a matter of degree and attaches to the uses and interpretations of scores and not to a test as such. The American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct applies the same logic to practice. Standard 9.02 requires psychologists to use instruments whose validity and reliability have been established for the population tested and, when they have not, to describe the strengths and limits of the results. Standard 9.06 requires them to weigh the purpose of an assessment and personal, linguistic and cultural factors that could reduce accuracy, and to state the limits of their interpretations. Those rules govern professionals, and a buyer can borrow them as questions. The Standards are described on their own site as guidance on testing, and neither they nor the APA code endorse RIOT, ACIS or any other product.

What a buyer should do follows from those questions.

1. Name the decision the number will feed. For a diagnosis, accommodations, hiring or admission to a society, neither product fits, and the page on who can administer an IQ test explains the route that does.
2. Check the norm group against yourself. RIOT's is United States born native English speakers aged 18 and older, and the page on how IQ scores are normed explains why that matters.
3. Read the margin for what it covers. RIOT's is built from internal consistency in one sitting, and no retest figure is public.
4. Compare time and coverage together, because 13 minutes and 175 minutes are different measurements.
5. Read the refund terms before paying. RIOT's are generally non-refundable, while ACIS offers a free trial and a five day quality guarantee.
6. Record the date, plan and version of any result, because both products can change.
7. Compare the free routes first. The page on free versus validated IQ tests lists what to check, and the page on IQ test apps and the page on adaptive IQ tests cover two other kinds of product, with the review of the free CORE battery as a worked example of the same checks.

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 RIOT, Trustpilot, Prolific, ISIR and Mensa pages were read on October 6, 2026 and will change, because prices, terms, ratings and scoring can be revised without notice. The implied reliabilities, the score bands around a printed margin, the Custom and combined prices, the ratio of test times and the T-score conversions are our arithmetic on published figures and are labeled as such where they appear. Statements about the Jacobs report are that report's own, and we did not inspect the site code it describes.

• RIOT IQ. Home page and plan pages, with prices, struck through list prices, subtests, stated times, margins, norm statements and the score range statement: home, Full, Basic, Custom and free test, read October 6, 2026.
• RIOT IQ. Example Full score report, a shared sample that states it does not reflect the reader's score, read October 6, 2026.
• RIOT IQ. Terms of Service and Test Administrator Terms of Service, both last modified August 26, 2025, read October 6, 2026.
• RIOT IQ. Test manual page, platform page, about page and support page, read October 6, 2026.
• RIOT IQ. Articles by its team: What is the RIOT IQ Test? (February 21, 2025), The 15 Subtests of the RIOT (February 21, 2025) and RIOT Test Flags Explained (June 8, 2025), read October 6, 2026.
• RIOT IQ. Articles on validity and retesting: Are Online IQ Tests Valid? (December 4, 2025) and What is test-retest reliability? (September 26, 2026), read October 6, 2026.
• Warne R T. Informational Bulletin for the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test, RIOT Technical Report No. 2025-01, RIOT IQ, last updated August 26, 2025, six pages, opened from the preview button on the manual page.
• Jacobs C G. An Independent Analysis of the RIOT IQ Test. Zenodo, report, August 21, 2026, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21972420. The title is quoted exactly as the Zenodo and DataCite records give it.
• Warne R. Heterogeneous relationships between working speed and ability on the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test (RIOT). Intelligence, 2026, volume 115, article 101990, confirmed through Crossref and not read in full.
• Trustpilot. RiotIQ reviews: TrustScore, review count, rating distribution, claimed status and review texts on both pages, read October 6, 2026.
• Prolific. Riot IQ marketplace listing, and International Society for Intelligence Research. The RIOT IQ Test: A Free IQ Testing Resource for ISIR Members, both read October 6, 2026.
• Steger D, Schroeders U, Gnambs T. A Meta-Analysis of Test Scores in Proctored and Unproctored Ability Assessments. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 2020, volume 36, issue 1, pages 174 to 184.
• Scharfen J, Peters J, Holling H. Retest effects in cognitive ability tests: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 2018, volume 67, pages 44 to 66. Figures are quoted as summarized in RIOT's article on test-retest reliability.
• Anwyl-Irvine A, Dalmaijer E, Hodges N, Evershed J. Realistic precision and accuracy of online experiment platforms, web browsers, and devices. Behavior Research Methods, 2021, volume 53, issue 4, pages 1407 to 1425.
• American Mensa. Qualifying test scores, read October 6, 2026.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) and the American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, Standards 9.02 and 9.06, provide the interpretive framework used in the last section. Citing them does not imply that their authors endorse RIOT, ACIS or any other product.

14 Frequently Asked Questions