Methodology

This page explains how every test on Mind Examination is built and scored. Each test page also explains its own scoring, and each guide lists its sources.

Where the questions come from

• Original items. Most questions are written for this site. They follow the structure of well-studied research instruments, but the wording and content are our own. The IQ puzzles are generated from explicit rules (for example “the number of shapes increases by one across each row”), so every puzzle has exactly one correct answer.
• Public-domain items. The 16 Personality Types Test uses the 50-item IPIP representation of Goldberg’s (1992) Big Five markers from the International Personality Item Pool, which is in the public domain.
• No copyrighted test content. We do not reproduce questions from commercial or licensed tests such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, the MSCEIT, the TEIQue, the Short Dark Triad, the Brief Resilience Scale, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Adversity Response Profile, the original Remote Associates Test or published compound remote-associate problem sets.

How scores are calculated

Our tests use four scoring methods; some combine two of them:

1. Correct-answer tests (IQ, Cognitive Reflection, the financial-literacy part of the Financial Mind Test, the word links in the Creativity Test): your score is the number of correct answers. The IQ test converts it to an estimated IQ (average 100, standard deviation 15) with a 90% range.
2. Rating-scale questionnaires (Emotional Intelligence, 16 Personality Types, Dark Triad, Resilience, the trait part of the Creativity Test): answers are averaged within each dimension, with reverse-worded statements flipped. Situational questions in the Emotional Intelligence Test are scored against responses that emotion-regulation research and expert judgment generally favor.
3. Choice-based tasks (Financial Mind): your choices are used to estimate a parameter — how strongly you discount future money, and how much larger a possible gain must be than a possible loss before you accept a bet.
4. Performance tasks (Working Memory): sequences get one square longer after each success, and each part stops after two misses at the same length. Your span is the longest sequence you reproduced correctly; the forward span is compared with published norms (provisional).

For the 16 Personality Types Test, each letter compares your score with a provisional population median rather than with the middle of the rating scale, so that the types are not skewed toward the traits most people rate themselves highly on.

Norms

When a test first opens, its norms are estimated from published studies of similar instruments and are labeled provisional on the result page. Tests without suitable published norms (Resilience, Creativity) show scores only, with no percentile, until enough results have been collected on this site. If you allow it, finishing a test sends an anonymous score summary (see the Privacy Policy). Once a test version has about 3,000 valid results, result pages switch to percentiles calculated from this site’s data and say so. Results completed unusually quickly are excluded from the norms.

Reliability and limits

• Short online tests have more measurement error than professional assessments, and conditions (distraction, tiredness, device) are not controlled.
• Self-report questionnaires show how you see yourself, which is not always how others see you.
• Results are estimates for self-reflection and learning. They are not a clinical, educational, financial or employment assessment. See the Disclaimer.

How content is written

Tests, guides and bias pages are written by the Mind Examination team with the help of AI tools. Each piece is checked against its sources by independent reviewers (including separate checks for citations, scientific wording and translation) and approved by an editor before publication. Corrections are welcome at info@mindexamination.com.