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The test returns a raw count of correct items, not an IQ. Everything the number means arrives later, from a norm table that expires faster than almost any other test's.
Raven's Progressive Matrices is the test most people have taken without being told its name. The item is always the same shape: a grid of figures with one cell left blank, and a row of candidate pieces underneath. Pick the piece that belongs. It appears in psychology studies, in army selection, in half the free tests online, and in almost every discussion of what a culture-reduced test looks like. What it does not do is produce an IQ. It produces a count.
The matrices were devised by John C. Raven and first published in the 1930s, and current editions are published by Pearson. There are three families, aimed at different parts of the ability range. The Coloured Progressive Matrices is the easiest, built for young children and older adults, and runs to 36 items across three sets. The Standard Progressive Matrices is the familiar one: 60 items in five sets of twelve, labelled A to E, each set opening easily and getting harder. The Advanced Progressive Matrices exists to separate people at the top, where the Standard version runs out of difficulty and everyone bunches together — the same ceiling problem that limits how high any test can report.
Every version scores the same way. One mark per correct item, no penalty for a wrong answer, no partial credit. Your result is a whole number. On the Standard Progressive Matrices it is somewhere between 0 and 60, and on its own it means nothing at all.
The published items are copyrighted and secure, so here is one built to the same pattern. Picture a three-by-three grid. The top row holds one small circle, then two small circles, then three. The middle row holds one triangle, two triangles, three triangles. The bottom row holds one square, then two squares, then a blank.
The rule, stated as a sentence: the shape is constant across a row and the count increases by one as you move right. So the missing cell is three squares. That is the whole discipline. If you can say the rule in one sentence, you have solved the item. If you are choosing the option that "looks right", you have recognised a shape, and the test is built specifically to punish that — the distractor set almost always contains a piece that completes the visual pattern while breaking the logical one.
Real items stack two or three rules at once, but the rules themselves come from a short list:
Read a row, name the rule, check the rule against the other row, then find the option that satisfies it. Checking against the second row is the step people skip, and it is the step that catches a rule you invented from one example. Our walkthrough of a single matrix puzzle with the working shown takes one harder item slowly and does exactly that.
If you cannot say the rule in one sentence, you have not solved the item. You have recognised a shape, which is what the wrong answers are designed to reward.
A raw score of 48 out of 60 is not a result yet. It becomes one when it meets a norm table: a record of how a reference sample of people, of a stated age, in a stated country, in a stated year, actually scored. The table converts the count into a percentile — the percentage of that sample who scored at or below you. That percentile is the real output of the test.
This is the part most online versions of the test skip or fake. Raven's has no mean-100 scale built into it the way the Wechsler scales do; some publishers supply standard-score conversions alongside the percentile tables, but the percentile is the primary currency and the standard score is derived from it. Any site that hands you a raw Raven's-style score and prints "IQ 137" underneath has quietly chosen a scale, a norm group and a year on your behalf, and told you none of the three. Our note on what to check before trusting an online score lists the questions that expose it.
If you do have a percentile and want to see what it looks like as a standard score, our percentile calculator does the conversion in both directions and shows the standard deviation it is assuming, which is the number that has to be stated for the answer to mean anything.
Raven's is the standard example of a test loaded on fluid reasoning: working out a relationship you have not been taught, on the spot, from the material in front of you. It leans very little on stored knowledge, which is what makes it useful across languages and education systems, and it is one of the most commonly used markers when researchers want a single number for general reasoning ability.
That narrowness cuts both ways. A full assessment reports several distinct index scores — verbal comprehension, working memory, processing speed and more — because those abilities come apart within a person. Raven's reports one. It cannot tell you that someone reasons abstractly well and holds information in mind poorly, and that difference is often the useful thing to know. Our explainer on full-scale IQ against index scores sets out what a single composite hides.
It is also worth retiring the phrase "culture-free". Removing words removes one large source of unfairness, and that is a real advantage. It does not remove everything: comfort with abstract diagrams, exposure to pencil-and-paper puzzles, and familiarity with the multiple-choice format itself are all learned, and they are not learned evenly. "Culture-reduced" is the honest description, and it is the one the more careful literature uses. Our page on the culture-fair style of test goes through what that reduction actually buys.
Matrix tests are unusually vulnerable to practice, and the reason is the same thing that makes them elegant. The item format is narrow — a handful of rule families, endlessly recombined — so somebody who has worked through fifty items has learned the search procedure itself: read a row, name the rule, check it against a second row, then find the option that satisfies it. That is a real skill, and it transfers straight to the next matrix test. The score rises while the ability the score is meant to estimate has not moved at all.
This is why supervised administrations record whether someone has sat the test before and how recently, and why retest intervals appear in test manuals. It is also the reason a matrix test you can retake at will cannot mean what a proctored one means: by the third attempt, the thing being measured is your familiarity with the format. Our piece on the practice effect on cognitive ability tests covers how large that gain usually is and how long it persists.
Raven's can be given with a time limit or without one, and the two administrations are not the same test. Untimed, it is closer to a pure reasoning measure: whether you can find the rule at all. Timed, speed enters the score, and speed is a partly separate ability. A person who finds every rule but finds them slowly will look worse under a clock, and whether that is the right answer depends entirely on what the score is for. The important part is that the norms and the administration must match — a raw score collected under a clock, read against untimed norms, is not a comparison of anything. Our assessment states its conditions and reports against norms collected the same way, which is the minimum any score needs before it is worth quoting.
If you want the experience of a matrix test done properly, take one that names its scale, times you the way its norms were collected, and returns a percentile with a confidence range rather than a bare number. That is what our assessment reports, and it is what any result worth quoting should look like.
Find your IQ score now! →The reason Raven's has survived nearly a century is that its item format is unusually honest: everything needed to solve the item is on the page, and the rule that solves it can be written down and checked by someone else. The scoring is where the honesty gets lost, because a raw count is easy to produce and a defensible norm table is expensive. When you see a Raven's-style score, ask which version, which norm group and which year. Those three answers are the score. The number on its own is just how many you got right.
It is an intelligence test in the sense that it measures reasoning ability, but it does not produce an IQ by itself. It returns a raw score — how many items you answered correctly — which becomes interpretable only against a norm table for a stated age group, country and year. That table gives a percentile, and any IQ-style figure is derived from the percentile afterwards.
There is no fixed answer, because a raw score out of 60 has no meaning without its norm table. The same raw score can fall at very different percentiles depending on the age group and the year the norms were collected. Ask for the percentile and the year rather than the raw number; if a test reports only a raw count, it has not told you anything you can use.
It depends on the version. The Standard Progressive Matrices has 60 items in five sets of twelve, labelled A to E. The Coloured Progressive Matrices, aimed at young children and older adults, has 36 items across three sets. The Advanced Progressive Matrices is designed to separate people at the top of the range, where the Standard version stops discriminating.
No, and "culture-reduced" is the accurate term. Removing words removes one major source of unfairness, which is why the test travels better across languages than a verbal one. It does not remove familiarity with abstract diagrams, with pencil-and-paper puzzles or with the multiple-choice format, all of which are learned and none of which are distributed evenly.
Corrections: spotted an error? Email corrections@iqmetrics.org and we will update this story and note the change here.
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