Who Can Administer an IQ Test: Levels A, B and C

0 Quick Answer: Level C Credentials Gate the Real Batteries

In the United States, an individually administered clinical intelligence battery can be purchased and administered only by someone who satisfies the publisher's Level C qualification, which normally means a doctorate in psychology, education or a closely related field with formal training in the ethical administration, scoring and interpretation of clinical assessments, or a state license or certification in a related field. Pearson's published qualifications policy states those criteria directly, and lists membership in bodies such as the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Academy of Neuropsychology or the International Neuropsychological Society as an alternative route to the same level.

The honest complication is that this is not one gate but three, and they are independent. The publisher's qualification review decides whether you may buy the kit. Your state licensing board decides whether administering and interpreting cognitive tests falls inside your scope of practice. The institution that receives your report, a school district, a disability adjudicator, a court or a graduate program, decides whether it will accept a score signed by someone with your credentials. Clearing the first gate tells you nothing about the second or the third, and people routinely discover this only after they have spent money.

If you came here because you want to test other people, sort yourself honestly. A licensed psychologist is almost always eligible. A school psychologist is eligible for the instruments used in educational eligibility work. A licensed therapist, counselor or social worker usually reaches Level B and not Level C. A psychiatrist can often purchase at Level B on the strength of the medical license without having been trained in Wechsler administration at any point. A teacher, recruiter, coach or parent reaches Level A, which is the tier with no restriction and, not coincidentally, no clinical batteries in it.

The cost structure follows the same lines. Restricted kits are sold as capital equipment with per use record forms on top, one reason the price ladder for a cognitive evaluation runs from nothing to well over six thousand dollars. The instrument is rarely the expensive part. The trained examiner hours are. Put on a per administration basis that is roughly $20 to $35 in software and materials against roughly $90 to $100 in professional time, the split worked out at what it costs an organization to test other people.

1 What Levels A, B and C Actually Require

The A, B, C system is a purchasing control operated by test publishers, not a licence issued by a government. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine described it plainly in its 2015 consensus report Psychological Testing in the Service of Disability Determination, which notes that publishers employ a tiered system, generally A, B and C, governing purchase, administration and interpretation, with Level C typically requiring an advanced degree, specialized psychometric knowledge and formal training, and Level A requiring nothing at all.

The wording differs between publishers, and the differences matter if you are borderline. Pearson runs three levels. Level A has no requirement. Level B is reached by a master's degree in psychology, education, speech language pathology, occupational therapy, social work or counseling plus formal training in ethical administration, scoring and interpretation, or by a degree or licence to practice in a healthcare or allied healthcare field, or by employment at an accredited institution. Level C requires the doctorate plus formal assessment training, state licensure or certification in a related field, or membership in one of the named psychological bodies.

PAR uses four tiers instead of three, inserting Level S between A and B for holders of a healthcare degree, certificate or licence, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, physician assistants, psychiatry and social work among them, who also have training in clinical behavioral instruments. PAR's Level B asks for a four year degree in a listed field plus coursework in test interpretation, psychometrics and measurement theory. Its Level C is Level B plus an advanced professional degree providing training in administering and interpreting psychological tests.

Note what the level is attached to. It is a property of the product, not of you. The same person can be cleared to buy a Level B rating scale and refused a Level C battery on the same order. That is why the question is never simply whether you can administer an IQ test, but which instrument, for which purpose, in which setting. The guide to what each subtest type actually isolates is a better map of that terrain than a publisher catalogue.

The line does not track how famous the instrument is either. Raven's 2, the matrix reasoning measure with its own age range and score scale, is a single domain instrument and is handled differently from a full battery reporting a Full Scale composite that aggregates every domain sampled. Two products can both be called IQ tests in ordinary speech and sit in different tiers, because one produces a narrow ability estimate and the other a clinically interpretable profile. Set out row by row, with publisher, current edition, age range, administration mode and qualification level in the same columns, the inventory of the instruments themselves makes that pattern legible: the three Wechsler scales all sit at Pearson's Level C, while the twelve minute Wonderlic that ordinary speech calls an IQ test is a hiring screen with no such gate on it.

2 Why the Restriction Is a Measurement Requirement, Not a Sales Gate

The reason a full battery is restricted is that its norms only apply to a session run exactly the way the standardization sample ran it, and running it that way is a trained skill. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014), published jointly by AERA, APA and NCME, make the point in Standard 6.1: test administrators should follow carefully the standardized procedures specified by the test developer, and in general the same procedures should be followed as were used when obtaining the data for scaling and norming the scores. Departures, the comment adds, may jeopardize the validity or complicate the comparability of the score interpretations.

Consider what an examiner does simultaneously on a Wechsler style verbal subtest. Reading the prompt verbatim, with the exact permitted repetitions. Recording the answer verbatim rather than as a judgement of correctness. Deciding in real time whether an ambiguous response meets the criteria for a query, then delivering the query in its scripted form and not a friendlier one. Applying reversal and discontinue rules, both of which change how many items the person ever sees. Scoring open responses against a rubric where a two point answer and a one point answer often differ by one word. None of that is intuitive, and none of it is visible from outside the session.

Timing is the clearest single example. On a speeded subtest the stopwatch starts on the last word of the prompt, and an examiner who starts it a beat early shifts a raw score that the norm table then converts as though nothing had happened. That is why processing speed is treated as a measured construct with its own domain rather than as a note about how fast someone worked, and why the clock on an ability test is a measurement decision rather than a gimmick.

Standard 10.1 ties this to competence rather than paperwork: those who use psychological tests should confine their testing and related assessment activities to their areas of competence, as demonstrated through education, training, experience and appropriate credentials. Standard 10.2 adds that whoever selects a test and draws inferences from its scores should be familiar with the relevant validity and reliability evidence for that use. That is the substance behind the letter grade. The page on reliability versus validity as separate claims works through why a score that repeats and a score that means something are different properties, and how a raw item count becomes a normed standard score explains why a nonstandard administration silently invalidates the conversion.

3 Can a Psychologist Administer an IQ Test?

Yes, in nearly every case, and the licensed psychologist is the profession the whole qualification system was built around. A doctoral level psychologist with a state license clears Pearson's Level C on the licensure criterion alone, and clears PAR's Level C on the advanced professional degree criterion. Formal training in administering, scoring and interpreting cognitive batteries is a standard component of accredited doctoral programmes in clinical, counseling and school psychology, delivered through coursework, a supervised assessment practicum and a supervised internship, so eligibility and competence usually arrive together rather than one substituting for the other.

Not every psychologist is the right psychologist. Standard 10.1 constrains practice to areas of demonstrated competence, and a social psychologist with a doctorate has the credential without the assessment training. A clinical psychologist who has never worked with adults over 75 may hold the licence and still be poorly placed to read a battery where age norms, sensory decline and speed interact. Neuropsychologists carry additional specialty training and handle referrals where the question is brain related, which is why suspected cognitive decline goes to them rather than to a generalist.

School psychologists sit slightly differently and are the group most often misdescribed. The National Association of School Psychologists states that most school psychologists hold at least a specialist level degree, typically requiring three years of full time graduate study, that many also earn doctorates, that all complete coursework in psychological and educational assessment, and that they must be state certified or licensed, with many holding the Nationally Certified School Psychologist credential. A specialist level school psychologist is not a doctoral psychologist, but the specialist degree plus state certification is generally sufficient for Level C on the certification criterion, which is why individually administered cognitive batteries are routine in school eligibility work.

The practical consequence for a member of the public is that the profession you are looking for is narrower than the word psychologist suggests. If you want to know what the session itself involves before booking one, the walkthrough of what happens from referral to written report covers the sequence, the wait and the invoice, and the comparison of a proctored battery against an online assessment covers what supervision buys you that a screen cannot. For the instruments themselves, the WAIS-5 and its 16 to 90 age range and the Stanford Binet 5 routing structure describe the two batteries a licensed psychologist is most likely to reach for.

Which of the two gets chosen is a clinical decision, not a preference. A side by side of the two adult batteries on structure and score coverage shows where they diverge, and why a score can drop between the WAIS-IV and the WAIS-5 is the commonest confusion when someone is retested years later on a renormed edition.

4 Can a Therapist, Counselor or Social Worker Administer One?

Usually not at Level C, which means not a full intelligence battery, though most licensed therapists comfortably reach Level B and can use a substantial amount of assessment material there. A licensed professional counselor, licensed mental health counselor, licensed clinical social worker or licensed marriage and family therapist typically holds a master's degree in a listed field, which satisfies Pearson's Level B criterion when it is paired with formal training in the ethical administration, scoring and interpretation of clinical assessments. The doctorate, the state licensure specifically in a Level C related field, or membership in APA, NASP, NAN or INS is what the next tier asks for, and a master's level counseling or social work licence generally does not supply it.

What Level B actually opens is larger than people expect. Behavioral and symptom rating scales, structured interviews, personality inventories, adaptive behavior measures, brief screeners and many group administered ability tests live at Level B. A therapist can legitimately gather a great deal of standardized information about a client without touching a Wechsler kit. What Level B does not open is the individually administered cognitive battery, and the reason is the one Standard 6.1 gives rather than a hierarchy of professional prestige.

The APA ethics code adds a constraint that runs in the opposite direction and catches people out. Standard 9.07 provides that psychologists do not promote the use of psychological assessment techniques by unqualified persons, except when the use is for training purposes with appropriate supervision. A psychologist who lets an untrained colleague run a battery under a nominal signature is the one in breach, not only the person administering it. That is why supervised administration is a formal arrangement with a named supervisor and a real review of the protocol, and not an informal favour.

If a therapist's client needs cognitive data, the ordinary path is a referral rather than a workaround. The therapist knows the referral question, which is the part clinicians actually value, and the receiving psychologist selects the battery. Where the question is developmental or educational rather than clinical, the page on giftedness that coexists with a disability explains why a single composite is the wrong output for that referral, and how to route a score into an actual decision covers what the number does and does not license once it arrives. Writing a sharper referral question also helps, and the summary of what the construct covers and where it stops is the fastest way to phrase one that a psychologist can actually answer.

5 Can a Psychiatrist or Physician Administer One?

A medical licence usually satisfies the purchase criteria at Level B, and at PAR's Level S, without any training in cognitive test administration having occurred, which is the clearest case in the whole system of eligibility running ahead of competence. Pearson's Level B is reachable through a degree or licence to practice in the healthcare or allied healthcare field. PAR's Level S explicitly names medicine, neurology, nursing, occupational therapy, physician assistants and psychiatry, with the qualifier that appropriate training and experience in ethical administration, scoring and interpretation of clinical behavioral instruments is also required.

Psychiatric residency covers the mental status examination, diagnostic interviewing and brief cognitive screens such as bedside orientation and recall tasks. It does not normally cover Wechsler administration, scoring rubrics for open verbal responses, or the interpretation of index level discrepancies. A psychiatrist who orders a cognitive evaluation is doing the right thing, and in practice that is what happens: the referral goes to a clinical neuropsychologist or a psychologist, and the resulting report comes back into the psychiatric record as data rather than as something the psychiatrist generated.

Neurologists occupy similar ground. Brief instruments used at the bedside to screen for cognitive impairment are within ordinary neurological practice. A full battery producing a Full Scale IQ and six index scores is not, and the distinction matters because the two produce different kinds of claim. A screen answers whether further evaluation is warranted. A battery produces normed, comparable, individually interpretable index scores, and its output is only as good as the fidelity of its administration.

The same logic applies to occupational therapists, speech language pathologists and nurses, all of whom reach Level B or Level S on a healthcare licence. Each has legitimate standardized instruments inside their own domain. None of those credentials, by itself, is training in individually administered cognitive assessment. Where a physician wants a defensible cognitive number for a patient without a full referral, the honest options are narrower than the catalogue suggests, and the guide to every setting where testing is actually available lays out what a hospital, a university clinic and a private practice each provide. For what the eventual report should contain, what comprehensive coverage means in practice sets a reasonable expectation.

Patient population changes the instrument as well as the examiner. Someone with limited English, aphasia or a hearing impairment cannot be validly assessed on a battery weighted toward spoken verbal comprehension, which is the case for a nonverbal battery and the specific limits it carries, and the same reasoning drives figural instruments built to reduce language and cultural loading. Standard 10.2 puts that selection decision with whoever is prepared to defend the validity evidence for it.

6 Teachers, Recruiters, Coaches and Parents

Everyone in this group sits at Level A, which is the tier with no qualification requirement and, by design, no individually administered intelligence batteries in it. There is no route by which a classroom teacher, a corporate recruiter, an executive coach, a tutor or a parent buys a WAIS kit. The publisher's qualification review exists precisely to stop that transaction, and it is applied at the point of order rather than as an honour system, because Standard 10.18 of the 2014 Standards states that tests, including obsolete versions, should not be made available to the public or resold to unqualified test users.

Teachers do administer standardized ability tests, and the distinction is worth being precise about. Group cognitive ability tests used in school screening are given by classroom staff under a district testing programme, with the district holding the qualification and providing the training. The teacher is an administrator inside a supervised programme, not an independent test user. Standard 12.16 asks those responsible for such programmes to provide the training, documentation and oversight that make administrators proficient in the procedures, and Standard 12.15 asks them to verify that whoever interprets the results is qualified or is assisted by someone who is.

Employment testing is a separate regulatory world rather than a lower tier of the same one. Cognitive ability instruments used in hiring are validated for job related prediction and are governed by employment law, adverse impact analysis and validation evidence for the specific use. They are not intelligence batteries with a different label, and their outputs are not IQ scores. The overview of the cognitive screens employers actually use, including the Wonderlic and the CCAT covers what those instruments do, and the general mental ability meta-analyses on work performance covers the evidence base that gets cited in defence of them.

Parents asking on behalf of a child face the sharpest version of this. You cannot buy the instrument, you cannot administer it, and a score you produce would not be accepted by the school district that prompted the question in the first place. The route is a referral to a school psychologist through the district, or a private evaluation. The page explaining that no accrediting body stands behind an IQ certificate is the fastest way to see why a self produced document does not travel, and what the gifted band around 130 requires as evidence sets out what a gifted programme will actually ask for. Adults chasing the same confirmation for themselves face a milder version, covered in what it takes to establish that you sit in the top 2 percent as an adult.

7 The Role Most People Asking This Question Can Actually Fill

If you want to administer cognitive tests and you do not have a doctorate, the job that exists is psychometrist, and it is a real, paid, supervised role rather than a consolation prize. The National Academies report describes the position directly: psychometrists are often bachelor's or master's level individuals who have received additional specialized training, and they administer and score tests but do not practice independently or interpret test scores. The same report notes that any person administering cognitive or neuropsychological measures must be well trained in standardized administration protocols, which is the actual content of the role.

A psychometrist in a neuropsychology service may administer more batteries in a month than the supervising psychologist does in a year. The division of labour is deliberate. Administration is a procedural skill that rewards repetition and can be trained to a high standard. Interpretation requires judgement about what a pattern of index scores means for a particular person with a particular history, and the licensing structure keeps that judgement attached to the clinician who carries responsibility for it.

The route in is employment rather than purchase. A psychometrist does not personally hold a qualification level, and does not need to. The employing practice or hospital holds the account, the supervising psychologist is the qualified test user of record, and the training is delivered in house against the publisher's administration manual with observed practice sessions and scored protocols reviewed before the trainee runs a live case. APA Standard 9.07's exception for training purposes with appropriate supervision is exactly the provision this arrangement runs under.

Two things this role does not give you. It does not let you set up independently, take referrals, or sign reports. It does not let you buy test materials for your own use, so a psychometrist who leaves a practice does not take a kit anywhere. Within those limits it is the answer for a large fraction of people who arrive at this question, and the qualification ladder above it is a matter of graduate training rather than a permanent wall.

The day to day content is procedural and specific. A working psychometrist reads sequences aloud at a fixed rate on a digit span task measuring working memory span, presents figural matrices without hinting on a matrix reasoning task measuring fluid reasoning, and keeps a stopwatch and a record form synchronised while maintaining enough rapport that the examinee keeps trying. If you want to see what the finished profile is made of before committing to the training, the six CHC domains a full battery samples and the Cattell Horn Carroll hierarchy those domains sit inside describe the machinery you would spend your days operating.

8 Research Use, Institutional Review Boards and the Second Gate

Research does not exempt anyone from the qualification levels, and clearing the qualification levels does not authorise research, because the two gates are independent and are operated by different institutions. A laboratory that wants to administer a Level C battery still buys it through a qualified individual, usually the principal investigator or a supervising licensed psychologist on the protocol, and the institutional account records that person as the qualified test user. There is no research discount on eligibility, and the common assumption that a university affiliation substitutes for a credential is wrong.

The second gate is human subjects review. In the United States, research at an institution holding a Federalwide Assurance is governed by 45 CFR 46.104, and cognitive testing appears there explicitly. Paragraph (d)(2) exempts research that only includes interactions involving educational tests, described in the regulation as cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude and achievement tests, along with surveys, interviews and observation of public behavior, if at least one of three criteria is met: participants cannot readily be identified from the recorded information, or disclosure outside the research would not reasonably place them at risk of criminal or civil liability or damage to financial standing, employability, educational advancement or reputation, or the information is identifiable and an institutional review board conducts a limited review.

That provision is frequently overstated. The exemption is a determination your review board makes, not one you make about yourself, and most institutions still require the protocol to be submitted for it. It also says nothing about whether you may lawfully purchase or competently administer the instrument. A protocol can be exempt under (d)(2) and still be blocked at the publisher's qualification review, and a fully credentialed investigator can be blocked by the review board on consent or data handling grounds.

Make the instrument decision and the governance decision together rather than in sequence. If a study needs a Level C battery, it needs a Level C person on the protocol and an administration budget measured in trained examiner hours. If it needs a normed multi domain measure a research assistant can deploy at scale without a clinical credential, that is a different instrument class with different limits, and pretending otherwise is how studies end up with unusable data. The public domain end of that class carries the trade in its purest form: the ICAR item pool sits behind no qualification level at all, having no publisher to assign one, and as the account of what an ICAR raw score can and cannot support shows, it publishes no reference distribution either, so a study takes away a within sample covariate rather than a number any participant can be told. The guide to what separates a free quiz from a validated assessment is the fastest filter for that class, and when an unsupervised score is accurate enough to be worth anything covers the failure modes a design has to anticipate.

One design trap survives every other precaution. Norms age, and comparisons across instruments normed decades apart are not comparisons of ability, which is the content of the secular rise in scores and its recent reversals. A study mixing an old edition with a current one produces a difference that is an artefact of the norm table rather than a finding.

9 Jurisdiction, Scope of Practice and Why the Publisher Form Is Not a Licence

Passing a publisher's qualification review confirms that a company is willing to sell you something. It does not confirm that your licensing board permits you to use it, and the two answers can diverge inside the same profession across state lines. Psychology licensure in the United States is granted state by state, and the statutory definition of the practice of psychology, including whether administering and interpreting psychological tests is reserved to licensed psychologists, is written into each state's practice act. Title protection compounds it: in some jurisdictions the word psychologist itself is restricted, so a person may be permitted to perform an assessment activity while being prohibited from describing themselves in the way clients expect.

Internationally the picture changes shape. The International Test Commission Guidelines on Test Use set out the competence framework most national systems build on, stating as their key purpose that a competent test user will use tests appropriately, professionally and ethically, with due regard to the needs and rights of those involved, the reasons for testing and the broader context, achieved by ensuring the user has the necessary competencies and the understanding that underpins them. The ITC is explicit that local qualification procedures are delegated to national psychological associations, which is why a competence certificate issued in one country does not transfer to another.

Two practical consequences follow. First, a credential check is not portable: a psychologist relocating between states or countries generally re-establishes eligibility rather than carrying it. Second, telepractice does not dissolve jurisdiction. Remote administration of a clinical battery is normally governed by where the examinee is located, not where the examiner sits, which is the constraint that makes remote testing an administrative problem as much as a technical one. The page on whether an official WAIS can legitimately be delivered over a video link covers what publishers permit and what the public imitations are, and what separates a professional battery from a quiz sets out the documentation you should expect either way.

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary structure of a regulated profession, and the reason a plain answer to who can administer an IQ test is impossible without naming a country, a state, an instrument and a purpose. Anyone offering a one line answer without those four is guessing. It is also why the unrestricted market exists at all: adult normed testing available directly to the public occupies the space left over once the restricted instruments are fenced off, and it is bound by what an unsupervised instrument can honestly claim rather than by a qualification form.

10 What Actually Happens When an Unqualified Person Administers One

Four things go wrong, and only the first is the one people anticipate. The order is refused. Publishers run qualification review at the point of purchase, ask for degree, licence number and training details, and decline orders that do not meet the level. There is no fine and no record follows you around, but the transaction simply does not complete, which is where most attempts end.

The second failure is the expensive one. A score obtained outside the standardized procedure is not accepted by whoever the score was for. School districts have their own eligibility criteria and will not act on a report from someone outside their accepted list of evaluators. Disability adjudicators, courts, licensing bodies and graduate programmes maintain similar requirements. A person can spend real money and produce a document that no institution will read, which is the same structural problem described in the page on why supervised administration is the one requirement no online score satisfies for society admission.

The third is professional exposure. A licensed clinician practising outside their scope faces board complaints, and the APA ethics code catches the supervising side as well through Standard 9.07's prohibition on promoting assessment use by unqualified persons. An ethics complaint does not require a bad outcome. It requires only that the activity fell outside demonstrated competence, which Standard 10.1 of the 2014 Standards defines in terms of education, training, experience and appropriate credentials rather than intent.

The fourth is test security, and it is the one publishers actually litigate. Standard 10.18 requires professionals with access to test materials to maintain confidentiality consistent with scientific, professional, legal and ethical requirements, states that tests including obsolete versions should not be made available to the public or resold to unqualified users, and notes that distribution, display or resale to unauthorised recipients infringes copyright and compromises security. Item exposure is irreversible. Once a subtest's content circulates, the norms collected on unexposed examinees no longer describe people who have seen it, which damages the instrument for everyone. If you want to see how quickly that degrades a measure, the account of what preparation does and does not change about a score covers the practice effect, what published example items can and cannot show you explains why real items never appear in public, and the survey of which public adult tests are worth taking seriously shows how differently the unrestricted market handles the same problem.

11 How a Qualified Examiner Actually Administers a Battery

If you are eligible and the question is procedural rather than permissive, the work is more constrained than most people imagine and almost none of it is improvised. Standard 6.1 sets the frame: specifications regarding instructions to test takers, time limits, the form of item presentation or response, and test materials should be strictly observed, and the same procedures should be followed as were used when the norming data were obtained. Everything below is downstream of that requirement.

Preparation comes first. The examiner confirms the referral question, selects the battery that answers it, checks the examinee falls inside the instrument's age range, and verifies the norms in hand are current. A quiet room, a table arrangement that keeps the record form out of the examinee's line of sight, a working stopwatch and the manual physically present are the baseline. Sensory status is checked before the first item rather than inferred afterwards, because a hearing or vision limitation invalidates specific subtests rather than the whole profile.

Administration itself follows the manual item by item. Start points depend on age or estimated ability. Reversal rules send the examiner backwards when early items are failed, so the examinee's floor is established rather than assumed. Discontinue rules end a subtest after a specified run of failures, which protects the examinee from a demoralising ceiling climb and keeps testing time inside the standardization frame. Timed subtests are timed to the second. Responses to open ended verbal items are written verbatim, because the scoring rubric operates on the exact words and an examiner's paraphrase silently destroys the distinction between a two point and a one point answer. That is most visible on a vocabulary task where the definition itself is scored on a graded rubric and on a similarities task where the abstractness of the relation decides the credit. Queries are delivered in their scripted wording only, and only where the manual authorises them.

Scoring and interpretation follow, and this is where the licence rather than the training does the work. Raw scores convert to scaled scores against the age band, scaled scores aggregate into indices, indices into a composite, and every conversion carries measurement error the report has to represent through confidence intervals rather than a bare point estimate. Discrepancy analysis between indices is where clinical judgement enters and where most overinterpretation happens. The page on why composites use a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 explains the scale the conversions land on, the exact percentile attached to each score shows what the number implies about position, the bands and labels the scale is divided into gives the vocabulary a report will use, how rare a given score is, expressed as one in how many people is the framing that most often gets overstated in a summary paragraph, and what the general factor is and is not covers the construct the composite is estimating.

12 Where ACIS Professional Fits, and Where It Does Not

ACIS is not a Level C instrument, and the reason is that it is not a clinical instrument, which is a statement about what it is not before it is a statement about what it is. It is an unsupervised, self administered online cognitive assessment. It is not proctored, it produces no diagnosis, and it does not replace an individually administered evaluation by a licensed professional. The qualification system does not apply to it because that system governs restricted clinical materials, and describing the absence of a Level C gate as an advantage would be dishonest. A reader who needs a Level C instrument should stop here and obtain one.

What it is: a 20 subtest battery across six primary cognitive domains, with scaled scores at mean 10 and SD 3 and composites at mean 100 and SD 15. In the technical analysis set of 2,750 complete records, the Full Scale IQ composite reached an omega of .9886 with a g loading of .958 and a standard error of measurement of about 1.60 IQ points, and the higher order g confirmatory model returned CFI .9761, TLI .9726, RMSEA .0406, SRMR .0217 and a chi-square of 916.703 on 166 degrees of freedom. The adult reference frame covers 3,243 English speaking records, ages 16 to 90. Every one of those figures carries the same limitation: the sample is self selected, administration is unsupervised, and the reference frame is modelled rather than census drawn. The derivation sits in the ACIS technical documentation.

ACIS Professional is the administration side. A free account includes three Quick administrations, then pay as you go at consumer prices, one credit equal to one dollar. Participants receive a private link, never create an account, and are identified only by a code you assign, so no name or email is stored. Scores, indices and Full Scale IQ are computed on the server rather than in the participant's browser, and the workspace exports cohort summary, long format score and codebook files. Item content, responses and keys are never exported. The research administration page documents the workflow, and the administration section on the home page is the short version.

Appropriate uses are research, screening and educational contexts where an unsupervised, normed, multi domain measure is what the question calls for. Inappropriate uses are clinical diagnosis, hiring decisions, accommodation determinations and high IQ society admission. Those are not disclaimers appended for safety, they are the boundary of what an unsupervised instrument can support, and the comparison of supervision, norms and score use across the two formats works through why. Each exclusion has its own reason: hiring turns on validation evidence for the specific job, the territory of the same construct sold under the workplace label, and society admission requires proctoring no unsupervised delivery provides.

13 Routing Yourself to the Right Answer

The question who can administer an IQ test resolves cleanly once you name the instrument and the purpose, and stays unanswerable while either is missing. The table below routes the common cases in a United States context. It describes purchase eligibility and typical practice rather than legal advice, because scope of practice is set by your own licensing board and nowhere else.

Three closing points survive every variation of the question. Eligibility is assembled from degree, supervised training and licensure rather than granted by a single examination, so no certificate you can buy shortcuts it. Purchase eligibility, scope of practice and institutional acceptance are three separate approvals, and the one people check is usually the least binding. And an unsupervised instrument used honestly for a question it can answer is more defensible than a restricted instrument used badly for a question it was never asked, which is the practical form of the argument in what actually makes a score accurate and in how bias, differential item functioning and fair score use come apart.

All of this rests on one document. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014), released in full at no cost by their three sponsoring bodies, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, is the source for Standard 6.1 on standardized administration, Standard 10.1 on demonstrated areas of competence, Standard 10.2 on knowing the validity evidence for your use, Standard 10.18 on test security, and Standards 12.15 and 12.16 on training and oversight in school testing programmes. The APA testing standards run alongside it: the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct at Standard 9.07 prohibits promoting assessment use by unqualified persons except for supervised training, and APA's guidelines for test user qualifications, summarised by Turner, DeMers, Fox and Reed in American Psychologist in 2001 and adopted by the APA Council of Representatives in 2000, are the framework the A, B and C tiers were built to implement. Read those before you take anyone's word for what you are allowed to do, this page included.

14 Frequently Asked Questions