IIF Certified Assessment
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IIF Certified Assessment
The cognitive and aptitude tests employers use, how they are scored, and what a score does and does not predict at work.
A cognitive ability test can produce pass rates eight points apart across two groups and clear federal guidelines. Another test can produce an eleven-point gap and fail the same screen. The difference is a ratio, not a point spread — and it is worth calculating yourself.
The belief that American employers are banned from testing cognitive ability traces to one 1971 Supreme Court case. That case did not ban testing — it set a condition, and the condition is the part everyone forgets.
Frontier models now operate a computer well enough to sit an assessment alongside a candidate. Across 19,368 AI-led interviews, 38.5 per cent were flagged for AI assistance.
The formula circulating online multiplies a Wonderlic score by two and adds sixty. It comes from no published conversion table, and the number it produces is not an IQ in the sense any test manual uses the word.
Recruitment screening and candidate assessment are high-risk uses under the EU AI Act, and their obligations were set to begin on 2 August 2026. A regulation in force since late July moved that date to 2 December 2027 — while leaving one workplace ban already biting.
Sitting the same test twice usually produces a higher second score. Almost none of that gain is ability — which is why employers use alternate forms, and why the second number is a worse estimate than the first.
Aptitude tests are among the better-studied hiring tools, and for decades the headline validity figures were quoted with more confidence than the corrections behind them deserved. A 2022 reanalysis pulled those numbers down.
An IQ figure is meaningless without the scale it was measured on and the range around it. Every story here reports all three, or says plainly that the source did not.
Each story ends with the studies, datasets and documents it draws on, named and attributed, so you can go and read them yourself.
Spotted an error? Write to corrections@iqmetrics.org. Corrections are made on the story and noted at the bottom of it — never quietly.
Our IIF-certified assessment reports your score with its scale, percentile and confidence range — and a breakdown of the cognitive domains behind it.
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