Free IQ Test: Pattern Reasoning

By Murat Şahin · Updated November 12, 2026 · How we test

How this IQ test works

Press Start the IQ test and a 20-minute timer starts. You see 25 puzzles, one at a time. Most are 3 × 3 grids with the bottom-right cell missing; a few are series of pictures or numbers where you choose what comes next. Each puzzle has six options and exactly one fits the rule. The puzzles are about finding rules; turning shapes in your head is tested separately in the spatial reasoning test.

Click an option, or press keys 1 to 6, and the test moves on. Back returns to an earlier puzzle so you can change your answer, and Skip leaves a puzzle blank for now. On the last puzzle, press See my result. If the timer reaches zero, the test ends and blank puzzles count as wrong, so it is better to guess than to leave a puzzle empty.

Every puzzle is generated by rules in your browser, so you get a fresh set each time you play. The rules stay the same, which means you can practise.

What the puzzles test

The puzzles get harder in four levels:

• Level 1 (puzzles 1–5): one rule, such as a shape count growing 1, 2, 3, an arrow turning 45° each step, or each row containing three different shapes.
• Level 2 (puzzles 6–12): two rules at once, such as shape and fill both rotating through a row, an outer shape set by the row and an inner shape set by the column, or a dot moving clockwise around a frame.
• Level 3 (puzzles 13–19): overlays and transformations: adding or subtracting the lines of two pictures, two objects moving in opposite directions, clock hands turning at different speeds, a figure that rotates but is never mirrored, and a number series.
• Level 4 (puzzles 20–25): the hardest rules: keeping only the lines or dots that appear in exactly one of two pictures (an XOR rule), keeping only shared lines, movements with a step you must read from the row, two interleaved number series, and a dot pattern that slides and wraps around.

After the test, the review list shows the rule behind every puzzle and whether you got it right.

How your score is calculated

You get two numbers:

• Correct answers out of 25. This is the score saved as your personal best in this browser.
• Difficulty-weighted points out of 64. Each level 1 puzzle is worth 1 point, level 2 is worth 2, level 3 is worth 3 and level 4 is worth 4. Two people with the same number of correct answers can differ here if one solved more hard puzzles.

The result card also shows how many puzzles you solved at each level.

How this compares with a real IQ test

A real IQ score is not a raw count of correct answers. It describes where you stand compared with a large, representative group of people of your age who took the same test under controlled conditions. Modern tests set the average of that group at 100 and the standard deviation at 15. Building those norms takes thousands of carefully sampled test takers, and they must be updated regularly because average scores have risen over the 20th century, a trend documented by James Flynn (1987).

This test has no norm group, so any IQ figure we showed would be invented. Many free online tests do exactly that. Instead, we give you a score you can trust for what it is: how many of these puzzles you solved, and how hard they were. Use it to compare yourself across attempts, not with an IQ chart.

The puzzles themselves are the kind a real test can include. Matrix reasoning, finding the rule in a grid with a missing piece, is part of many intelligence tests, as the next section explains. But this page covers only that one kind of puzzle, without a controlled setting or a norm group. For a real IQ assessment, for example for school or clinical reasons, see a qualified psychologist who uses a standardized, normed test.

Raven's matrices: the idea behind the puzzles

The grid format comes from John C. Raven, who published the Progressive Matrices in 1938. His puzzles use no words and almost no cultural knowledge: you see a pattern with a missing piece and choose the correct piece from several options. Raven designed them to measure what Charles Spearman called eductive ability, the capacity to make sense of complexity and find the rule. Matrix puzzles remain a part of many intelligence tests today.

Patricia Carpenter, Marcel Just and Peter Shell (1990) analysed Raven's items and found that a small set of rules explains most of them: a value that stays constant in a row, a steady progression, adding or subtracting figures, and a "distribution of three" where each row contains three values in a different order. Our generator uses the same kinds of rules, plus rotations, movements and number series. All puzzles on this page are original; none is copied from Raven or any other published test.

Limits of an online test

Your score depends on your focus, how rested you are, the screen you use and whether you have seen similar puzzles before. Practice improves scores on puzzles like these, so a second attempt is not a fair measure of the same thing as a first one. A pattern test covers only one part of intelligence; it says nothing about memory, language, knowledge or creativity. For memory, try the working memory test or the number memory test.

More tests of attention, memory and thinking are on the memory and brain tests page.

Sources

• Raven, J. C. (1938). Progressive Matrices: A Perceptual Test of Intelligence. H. K. Lewis.
• Carpenter, P. A., Just, M. A., & Shell, P. (1990). What one intelligence test measures: A theoretical account of the processing in the Raven Progressive Matrices Test. Psychological Review, 97(3), 404–431.
• Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 171–191.

Frequently asked questions