Wonderlic score to IQ: the conversion chart, where it comes from, and where it breaks

0 Quick Answer

The conventional conversion sets a Wonderlic score of 20 at about IQ 100 and treats each raw point as about 2 IQ points, so a 30 maps to about 120 and a 40 to about 140, and the basis for it is a correlation of .93 between the Wonderlic Personnel Test and the Wechsler Full Scale IQ that Dodrill reported in 1981. That study, in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, volume 49, issue 5, pages 668 to 673, administered both instruments to 120 adults and proposed the Wonderlic as an economical estimate of general intelligence. Dodrill and Warner extended the work in the same journal in 1988, volume 56, issue 1, pages 145 to 147. A correlation of .93 is high, and it is not identity: it leaves the conversion with an error band that widens toward the ends of the scale, where a 12 minute test runs out of items at the top and out of time in the middle.

The test itself has changed. Wonderlic's candidate FAQ, dated October 2, 2025 and read on September 19, 2026, describes the current Wonderlic Select as three sections, a 12 minute cognitive section of 50 questions that candidates are not expected to finish plus untimed motivation and personality sections of 58 and 150 items, scored by a proprietary algorithm against the demands of a specific job. The FAQ states that traditional numerical scores for the cognitive portion are not available to candidates and that there is no universal good or average score. A person who took the Wonderlic Select in 2026 therefore has no number to convert; the chart on this page applies to the classic 0 to 50 Wonderlic Personnel Test and its successors that reported a raw score.

The conversion is an estimate of one number from another, not a measurement. A normed IQ battery reports six domains with an error band on each, separates speed from reasoning, and is not built to be finished in 12 minutes. The page on pre-employment cognitive tests covers the job testing market; this page is about what the score means once you have it.

1 What the Wonderlic Is Today

The Wonderlic Select of 2026 is a hiring assessment with a cognitive section inside it, and the publisher no longer reports a cognitive score to the person who took it. Wonderlic's candidate FAQ is the primary source and is unusually direct. The Wonderlic Select, formerly Wonscore, is used by organizations in their hiring processes and is comprised of three sections, one timed and two untimed, requiring an average of 35 minutes. The timed cognitive section contains 50 questions in 12 minutes, and test takers are not expected to complete all of them. The motivational interests section contains 58 items and the personality section 150, neither with right or wrong answers. Only the cognitive section is scored for correctness, and the FAQ describes its questions as measuring the ability to apply logic and reason rather than knowledge.

The scoring is the part that matters for anyone searching for a conversion. The FAQ states that there is no universal good or average score, that unlike previous versions the Select does not provide a singular numerical cognitive ability score, and that the results of the three sections are combined and evaluated against the demands of the specified job by a proprietary algorithm. Candidates receive at most a Candidate Feedback Report, and the FAQ says that traditional numerical scores for the cognitive portion are not available to applicants, while employers see the results immediately and are generally not required by law to share them.

Two further statements in the FAQ change how the test should be read. The Select is typically not proctored, because most of it has no correct answers and the time limit on the cognitive section makes proctoring unnecessary in the publisher's view. And there is no cost to candidates, because Wonderlic sells only to organizations; the FAQ warns that anyone asking a candidate to pay for a Wonderlic test is a third party selling practice material. The International Test Commission's guidelines on internet delivered testing, in the International Journal of Testing, 2006, volume 6, issue 2, pages 143 to 171, would classify an unproctored administration with identification as controlled mode, which supports weaker interpretations than a supervised session; the publisher's position is that the job prediction, not the individual score, is the product.

The consequence is that the phrase Wonderlic score, as used in the conversion charts across the internet, refers to the classic Wonderlic Personnel Test and its direct successors, which reported a raw score from 0 to 50. That is the number the rest of this page converts, with the caution that a person tested through the Select in 2026 does not have one.

2 Where the IQ Conversion Comes From

The conversion rests on one well designed study and one convention, and knowing which is which tells you how much to trust the chart. The study is Dodrill's. In 1981 he administered the Wonderlic Personnel Test alongside the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale to 120 adults and reported a correlation of .93 between the Wonderlic score and the Full Scale IQ, proposing the 12 minute test as an economical method for estimating general intelligence when a full administration was impractical. The paper's title says exactly that. Dodrill and Warner returned to the question in 1988 with further samples and found the relationship held, which is why the Wonderlic acquired a reputation as a brief proxy for the Wechsler scale among clinicians and not only among employers.

The convention is the linear mapping. The publisher's manuals for the Personnel Test aligned a raw score of 20 with the population average and treated each raw point as about two points on the IQ scale, which produces the familiar rule of doubling the score and adding 60. The rule is a convenience: it is a straight line through a relationship that is not straight at its ends, and the publisher's current FAQ neither repeats it nor publishes any conversion. The table on this page uses the convention because it is the one every reader will meet, and labels the result as an estimate under that convention rather than as a measured IQ.

A correlation of .93 sounds like near identity and is not. The page on reliability and validity explains the arithmetic: the proportion of variance in one score predictable from the other is the square of the correlation, about .86, which leaves about 14 percent unexplained. In practice that means a person with a Wonderlic 30 has a Wechsler Full Scale IQ most likely near 120 and plausibly anywhere in a band roughly 10 points wide on either side, and the band is wider still because the Wonderlic score has its own measurement error before any conversion is applied. The chart gives a point estimate; the point has a band; the band is the honest answer.

3 The Conversion Chart

Under the conventional mapping, the table below converts every raw score from 10 to 50 to an IQ estimate and a percentile, and every row is our arithmetic on the convention rather than a figure from any manual. The IQ column is twice the raw score plus 60. The percentile column is the standard normal percentile for that IQ on a scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, which the IQ percentile calculator computes for any point. Rows below 10 are omitted because they fall in the region where the test's floor and guessing dominate, and rows above 45 are marked because the ceiling dominates there.

Read the last column, not the second. The IQ estimate in the second column is a straight line, and the reading in the fourth column is what the line can support at each point. Between roughly 16 and 36 the line is a reasonable estimate with a band of about 10 points either side. Below 16 the score is increasingly a measure of how many items were reached and guessed, and above 36 it is increasingly a measure of speed, because a person who can solve every item still has to solve them in 14 seconds each to score 50. The page on the IQ score chart shows where these estimates fall on the standard scale, and the page on the gifted IQ range explains what a score in the upper rows would mean if it came from a normed battery rather than a conversion.

4 Where the Conversion Breaks

A straight line through a curved relationship fails at both ends for reasons that are built into the test, and a reader with a high or low score should distrust the chart in proportion to the distance from 20. The first reason is time. Fifty items in 12 minutes is 14.4 seconds per item, and the publisher's own FAQ states that candidates are not expected to finish. A test that most people do not finish is measuring speed of work as a component of every score, and speed is a separate ability from reasoning, as the page on processing speed explains and as every professional battery acknowledges by scoring it separately. Two people of equal reasoning ability who differ in speed will differ in Wonderlic score, and the conversion will call the faster one more intelligent.

The second reason is the ceiling. A perfect score is 50, and the difference between a 45 and a 50 is five items solved in the same 12 minutes, which is a difference in speed at the top of the range more than a difference in the ability the items test. The page on high range IQ tests explains why brief instruments cannot resolve differences in the top percentiles, and the page on the highest IQ ever explains why numbers above a normed ceiling are extrapolations. A Wonderlic 50 converted to 160 is an extrapolation of exactly that kind.

The third reason is measurement error, which the conversion ignores entirely. A 50 item speeded test has a reliability well below that of a full battery, and every reliability produces a standard error. The Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test, a direct competitor with 50 items in 15 minutes, reports a Cronbach's alpha of .86 on 97,929 test takers in its information brief, read on September 19, 2026; a reliability of .86 on an IQ scale corresponds to a standard error of about 5.6 points and a 95 percent band of about 22 points, which is our arithmetic on the standard formula. The page on the 15 point standard deviation explains the unit, and the ACIS technical manual, for comparison, reports a standard error of 1.60 points on its Full Scale IQ from a composite reliability of .9886. A conversion that turns a raw score into a single IQ has dropped a band of that width on the floor.

The fourth reason is content. The Wonderlic mixes verbal, numerical and logical items into one score, and a person with a strong verbal profile and weak numerical reasoning, or the reverse, gets a single number that averages the two. A normed battery reports them separately, which is the difference between an estimate of g and a profile, and the page on what an IQ test measures explains why the profile is the more useful object for most adults.

5 The Band Around a Converted Score, Worked Through

A converted score carries two errors stacked on each other, the error of the conversion and the error of the test, and putting numbers on both shows why the chart's single figure is optimistic. The first error follows from the correlation. When one score is predicted from another with a correlation of .93, the standard error of the estimate on the predicted scale is the standard deviation of that scale multiplied by the square root of one minus the correlation squared. On the IQ scale that is 15 times the square root of one minus .8649, which is 15 times .3676, or about 5.5 points. A 95 percent band from the conversion alone is therefore about plus or minus 10.8 points around the chart's figure, which is our arithmetic on Dodrill's coefficient and on the standard formula, not a figure from any publisher.

The second error belongs to the Wonderlic score before it is converted. A 50 item speeded test taken once has a reliability below that of a full battery, and although the publisher's current FAQ publishes no figure, the CCAT, a test of the same length and design, reports .86. A reliability of .86 gives a standard error of 15 times the square root of .14, about 5.6 IQ points, on the converted scale. The page on reliability and validity explains why the two errors do not simply add, but combining them in the usual way, as the square root of the sum of their squares, gives a standard error of about 7.8 points and a 95 percent band of about plus or minus 15.

Read against the chart, that band means a Wonderlic 30, converted to 120, is consistent with a Wechsler Full Scale IQ anywhere from about 105 to about 135 at 95 percent confidence, and the converted point is only the centre of that range. A Wonderlic 24, converted to 108, spans roughly 93 to 123, which covers the low average, average and high average regions of the IQ score chart at once. The band is not a flaw in the conversion so much as the truth about a short test: a 12 minute screen that most people do not finish cannot fix a person's position on the scale more precisely than that, and no arithmetic performed on its score can add the precision back. A battery narrows the band by measuring more, which is why ACIS prints a standard error of 1.60 points on a composite built from 20 subtests, and why the conversion chart should be read as a range with a centre rather than as a number.

6 What the Wonderlic Measures, Set Against a Battery

The Wonderlic is a good measure of general mental ability for the purpose it was built for, ranking job applicants quickly, and it is not a cognitive profile, because it was never designed to produce one. Dodrill's correlation of .93 with the Wechsler Full Scale IQ says that the single score tracks the general factor well, which is what a screening test needs. The page on the g factor explains why a short mixed content test can do this: the general factor runs through every kind of item, so a mixture of items loads on it. What the mixture cannot do is separate the abilities, because separation requires enough items of each kind to score each kind reliably.

The comparison with a battery is a comparison of what is reported. The table below sets the classic Wonderlic against the ACIS Full Scale form, using the publisher's FAQ for the Wonderlic and the technical manual and order page for ACIS, read on September 19, 2026.

The rows on speed and on separate abilities are where the conversion loses information that cannot be recovered by arithmetic. A person whose Wonderlic is 24 and whose reasoning is a standard deviation above their speed has a battery profile that the single score cannot show, and the page on cognitive domains describes what each of the six domains contributes.

7 The Other Job Test: the CCAT, and Whether It Converts

The Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test is the Wonderlic's closest competitor, it reports a raw score and a percentile to the employer, and the same logic applies to any attempt to convert it to an IQ. Criteria's product page, read on September 19, 2026, describes the CCAT as 50 questions in 15 minutes across verbal, numerical and spatial reasoning, and its documentation states that very few people finish all 50 items and that the average test taker answers 24 correctly. Its score report guide explains that each candidate receives a raw score and a percentile ranking against others who have taken the test, and its information brief reports the Cronbach's alpha of .86 on 97,929 test takers cited above.

Two things distinguish the CCAT from the classic Wonderlic for a reader trying to convert. The first is that Criteria publishes a percentile, which is a better object to convert than a raw score, because a percentile maps directly to an IQ on any stated scale: the 50th percentile is 100, the 84th is 115, the 98th is 131 on a scale with a standard deviation of 15. The page on IQ score versus percentile does that conversion. The second is that the CCAT's percentile is a rank among CCAT takers, who are job applicants rather than a population sample, so the mapping to a population IQ carries an unknown offset. Criteria publishes no IQ conversion, and none is implied by its documentation.

A CCAT 24, therefore, means the 50th percentile among applicants tested with it, which is close to but not the same as a population IQ of 100, and a CCAT 40 means a high percentile among applicants with the same time and ceiling limits the Wonderlic has. The honest conversion for either test is the percentile column of its own report, read with the knowledge that the reference group is applicants and the reliability is around .86.

8 The NFL and the Wonderlic

The Wonderlic became the most famous cognitive test in the United States because of football, and the league that made it famous stopped using it in 2022. Sports Illustrated reported on January 5, 2022, citing a memo obtained by the Associated Press, that the NFL would eliminate the Wonderlic from the scouting combine, noting that the test had been introduced to the league in the 1970s by the Dallas Cowboys' coach Tom Landry and had long been criticized for its limited ability to predict success on the field. Individual teams have since used other cognitive assessments, and the league adopted no formal replacement. The memo also warned clubs about the conduct of prospect interviews, which places the decision inside a wider revision of how the combine treated the players it was evaluating rather than a psychometric judgment about the test. Public knowledge of the scale, including the widely circulated highs and lows of individual players, came from leaked scores rather than from the publisher, and the page on IQ and job performance explains why a general ability score predicts performance in some occupations far better than in others.

The football history explains why the conversion chart exists in the public mind. For decades a draft prospect's Wonderlic was reported as if it were an IQ, and readers doubled it and added 60 without knowing where the rule came from. The rule was always an approximation built for a different purpose: Dodrill wanted an economical estimate for clinical settings, the publisher wanted an occupational screen, and the sports press wanted a number. None of the three was measuring a quarterback's cognitive profile, and the league's decision to drop the test reflected the gap between a 12 minute score and the ability to play.

9 The Law Behind Employment Testing

The Wonderlic is also the test at the centre of the Supreme Court decision that governs cognitive testing in American hiring, which is why employers use it inside validated systems rather than asking for an IQ. In Griggs v. Duke Power Company, decided in 1971 and reported at 401 U.S. 424, the company had required a high school diploma and passing scores on the Wonderlic Personnel Test and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test for transfer into its better paid departments. The Court held under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that an employment practice with a disparate effect on a protected group must be shown to be related to job performance, and that the company had not shown its tests to be. The decision did not ban cognitive testing; it required validation, and the industry that validates selection tests grew from it. The operational rules followed in 1978, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and three other federal agencies adopted the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, codified at 29 CFR Part 1607. The guidelines require an employer whose selection procedure has an adverse impact to hold validity evidence for it, and they define adverse impact by the four fifths rule: a selection rate for any group that is less than 80 percent of the rate for the highest group is treated as evidence of adverse impact. That rule is why a Wonderlic or CCAT cut score is set with reference to studies rather than to a number the hiring manager likes, and why the score the candidate sees is a rank against a validated threshold rather than an intelligence estimate.

The research that justifies validated cognitive testing is also specific. Schmidt and Hunter reviewed 85 years of selection research in Psychological Bulletin in 1998, volume 124, issue 2, pages 262 to 274, and reported that general mental ability tests predicted job performance with a validity of .51 across the literature, the highest of any single method they examined. That figure is why the Wonderlic and the CCAT exist. It is a statement about populations of applicants and about the general factor, and it does not convert an individual's screening score into a statement about their intelligence, which is the distinction the page on pre-employment cognitive tests draws in detail.

10 Reading Your Own Score, If You Have One

If you have a classic Wonderlic raw score or a CCAT percentile, the useful reading is the rank it implies and the purpose it served, and the IQ conversion is the least useful thing you can do with it. The employer compared your score with a cut score for the role, usually expressed as a percentile among applicants or a raw score threshold set by the publisher's occupational norms. That comparison decided the hiring step and nothing else. A score above the threshold means you cleared a screen; a score below it means you did not clear it in 12 minutes on that day, which is the whole of the information.

Translate the score to a rank rather than to an IQ. A raw score of 24 on the CCAT is the 50th percentile among its takers by the publisher's own statement; a classic Wonderlic in the mid twenties is above the conventional average of 20. Then ask what the rank cannot tell you: whether you are faster than you are able or abler than you are fast, whether your verbal and numerical abilities are matched, and whether working memory or spatial ability, which neither test measures, would tell a different story. The page on IQ test questions shows the item types a full battery uses, and the difference between that list and the three item types of a screening test is the difference in what the two can say.

If the score matters to you beyond the job application, because it was lower than you expected or because you want to know what a real measurement would show, the next step is not a second screening test. Practicing the Wonderlic raises the Wonderlic score, as practice raises any timed format, and the page on how to prepare for an IQ test explains why a practiced score no longer means what the norms say. The next step is a normed battery that reports what the screen could not.

11 From a Screening Score to a Measurement

A normed cognitive battery differs from a job screen in three ways that matter to the person tested: it reports a profile, it reports error, and it separates speed from reasoning. ACIS scores 20 subtests against an adult reference frame of 3,243 records in age bands from 16 to 90, per its technical manual, and reports a Full Scale IQ with a composite reliability of .9886 and a standard error of 1.60 points, six primary indices and 20 subtest scaled scores, each with its own reliability and standard error. Its reasoning subtests are timed generously enough to function as power tasks within a session, and its Processing Speed Index, built from Symbol Search and Coding, carries the speed component that a 12 minute screen mixes into everything.

For a person who has only ever seen a Wonderlic number, the profile is the new information. The verbal and numerical content that the screen averaged into one score appear as a Verbal Comprehension Index and a Quantitative Reasoning Index, and the two are read against each other with their bands. The abilities the screen did not sample, working memory, visual spatial ability and processing speed, appear with their own indices. The page on full scale IQ explains how the composite is built from the domains, and the page on IQ tests for adults describes what the report contains.

The band is the other new information. A Wonderlic 30 converted to 120 is a point with no stated error. An ACIS Full Scale IQ of 120 is printed with a standard error of 1.60, which makes it a band of about 117 to 123 at 95 percent confidence, and each index carries its own wider band. A reader who has both numbers should not be surprised if they differ by 10 points in either direction; the conversion's own error, the screen's speed loading and the battery's broader content each contribute to the gap, and the battery's number is the one with a band around it.

12 Where ACIS Sits, and What a Buyer Should Do

We sell a paid cognitive assessment, so treat this section as a disclosure and check it against the rest of the page. ACIS is not a hiring test and is not used by employers as one in the way the Wonderlic or the CCAT are; it is a normed measurement of an individual's cognitive profile, sold to the person tested and, through a professional interface, to practitioners and researchers. It is not accepted for Mensa admission or for any institutional purpose, as the page on official IQ tests sets out. Its evidence is in the technical manual, version 1.4, updated August 3, 2026: an adult reference frame of 3,243 records, a technical analysis set of 2,750 complete records, a confirmatory factor model with a comparative fit index of .9761, and a reliability and standard error for every score.

The prices are one time: 15 dollars for the Quick form of six subtests, 30 for Optimized with thirteen, 50 for Full Scale with twenty, and a per subtest price for the Custom form on the order page. Five subtests are free without a card, access stays open for 30 days, and the quality guarantee is a full refund within five days if the report does not deliver the features described at checkout or a technical issue prevents access; it does not cover disliking the score.

The limits are the ones this page has drawn around every instrument. ACIS is self administered rather than supervised, its norms are for English speaking adults, its Spatial Navigation subtest was retired on September 7, 2026 and replaced by Layer Rotation in the Visual Spatial Index with the affected tables to be reissued in the next edition, and no score from it should be read without the band printed beside it.

What a buyer should do is decide which number they need. If an employer's screen is the question, the screen's own percentile is the answer and no conversion improves it. If the question is what the screen could not show, a normed battery answers it for the price of a few practice test subscriptions, and the five free subtests are the place to see whether the profile is worth the rest. If the question is a certificate or a diagnosis, neither a screening score nor a battery provides one, and the pages on official IQ tests and on neuropsychological testing for adults explain the routes that do.

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. The conversion table is our arithmetic on the conventional mapping of twice the raw score plus 60 and on the standard normal distribution, and is labelled as such; the standard error quoted for a reliability of .86 is our arithmetic on the standard formula. Publisher pages were read on September 19, 2026 and will change.

• Dodrill C B. An economical method for the evaluation of general intelligence in adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1981, volume 49, issue 5, pages 668 to 673.
• Dodrill C B and Warner M H. Further studies of the Wonderlic Personnel Test as a brief measure of intelligence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1988, volume 56, issue 1, pages 145 to 147.
• Wonderlic. Wonderlic Select test: frequently asked questions from candidates, dated October 2, 2025. wonderlic.com, read September 19, 2026.
• Criteria Corp. Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (CCAT) product page. criteriacorp.com, read September 19, 2026.
• Criteria Corp. Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test information brief, with the reliability figure of .86 on 97,929 test takers. criteriacorp.com, read September 19, 2026.
• Criteria Corp. CCAT score report guide, raw score and percentile ranking. criteriacorp.com, read September 19, 2026.
• Schmidt F L and Hunter J E. The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 1998, volume 124, issue 2, pages 262 to 274.
• Supreme Court of the United States. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Justia.
• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and others. Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, 29 CFR Part 1607. ecfr.gov, read September 19, 2026.
• Gastelum A. Report: NFL to stop using Wonderlic test at 2022 combine. Sports Illustrated, January 5, 2022.
• International Test Commission. International Guidelines on Computer-Based and Internet-Delivered Testing. International Journal of Testing, 2006, volume 6, issue 2, pages 143 to 171.
• ACIS. Technical manual, version 1.4, updated August 3, 2026: reliability tables and SEM interpretation, confirmatory factor analysis output. acisiq.com/technical-manual.

14 Frequently Asked Questions