Sixty seconds

Quick math test: one minute, one number

Sixty seconds of sums, typed, and a single count at the end of it — free, no account, and the button to go again is the first thing on the results panel. The sums climb through five published levels, one level per five correct answers, because a sprint at a fixed difficulty measures typing rather than arithmetic and a sprint whose ramp is hidden hands you a number nobody can reproduce. Your best stays in your own browser, the score fits in a link with three numbers in it, and there is no breakdown here at all: that is the drill next door.

100% free
No signup
60 seconds
5 published levels
Best kept locally

One minute, as many sums as you can get right, one number at the end. There is no breakdown on this page and no analysis of where your time went — that is the drill next door. This one exists to be taken again immediately.

The ladder, printed because the score depends on it

Level 1 — single digits, plus and minus
Level 2 — two digits plus or minus a single digit, and the times tables
Level 3 — two digits plus or minus two digits, and exact division inside the tables
Level 4 — two digits times a single digit, and two-digit sums that carry
Level 5 — three digits plus or minus two, and division with a two-digit answer

Every 5 correct answers moves you up one, and it never moves back down. A sprint at a fixed difficulty would be measuring how fast you type; a sprint whose ramp is hidden would be handing you a number nobody can reproduce.

A wrong answer costs you the item and the seconds you spent on it and nothing else, so there is nothing to be gained by leaving one blank. The clock stops if this tab goes to the background, because a minute you were not looking at is not a minute.

How to run the sixty-second sprint

Start, type, repeat — and read the ladder first if the number is going to mean anything.

Read the ladder before you start
Five levels, from single-digit sums to three-digit addition and division with a two-digit answer, every one of them listed on the start screen. Five correct answers move you up and nothing moves you back down. This matters because the score is a function of the ramp: a run that reached level four was answering harder sums than a run that stalled at level two, which is why the level you reached is printed beside the count and why two counts from different ladders are not comparable at all.
Type and press Enter, or use the pad
The field takes focus on its own and the number pad below it is there for a phone, where there is no keyboard to rest your fingers on. A wrong answer costs you the item and the seconds you spent on it and nothing more, so there is no reason to leave one blank and no advantage in guessing wildly either. The clock stops if the tab goes to the background — a minute you were not looking at is not a minute — and picks up with the seconds you had left.
Take the number, then take it again
The result is a count, the level you reached, your longest unbroken run and the number of sums you attempted. Everything else about the run is discarded. A link carrying three of those numbers can be copied and sent, and whoever opens it sees the score to beat before they start; your best on this browser is remembered locally so the second run has something to aim at. One minute is short enough that the honest thing to do with a surprising score is run it twice more.

Technical specifications

Duration	60 seconds of visible time. The clock is driven by animation frames, which stop arriving when a tab is hidden, so time spent on another tab is not counted and not silently added either
The ladder	Five levels: single digits; two digits against a single digit plus the times tables; two digits against two digits plus exact division inside the tables; two digits times a single digit plus sums forced to carry; three digits against two plus division with a two-digit answer
Promotion	Every 5 correct answers, and it never demotes. A wrong answer does not push you back down a level — it costs the item and the seconds, which is penalty enough inside a minute
Answer entry	Typed, with a 6-digit cap on the field and a 10-key pad for touch. Nothing is multiple choice, so the guessing rate is effectively zero and a score cannot be inflated by eliminating options
Warm-up	10 sums with no clock, offered before the sprint and counted in nothing. Five at level one and five at level two, so the ramp is not a surprise the first time it happens
What the score includes	The typing. Every answer is entered by hand, so a count is arithmetic plus keystrokes, and the median seconds per correct answer is printed for that reason rather than as an analysis
Best score	Kept in this browser's local storage under one key, holding one integer. It is never sent anywhere, is not readable by any other site, and disappears with your site data
Share link	A base64url fragment holding the count, the level reached and the sums attempted, plus the run's seed and a scoring revision. A link written under a different revision is refused rather than reinterpreted

Frequently asked questions

Why does the difficulty go up during the run?

Because a sprint at fixed difficulty stops measuring arithmetic after about ten seconds. Single-digit sums are retrieved rather than computed, so a minute of them measures how fast you can type two characters and press Enter — and the fastest typist wins a test that was supposed to be about mental arithmetic. Ramping keeps the sums at the edge of what you can do, which is what makes the count meaningful. The cost is that the score now depends on the ramp, which is why the whole ladder is printed on the page instead of being tuned quietly behind it.

Should I go for speed or for accuracy?

Speed, up to the point where errors start eating the minute — and that point is the interesting thing about this format rather than a flaw in it. Every speeded task lets you trade one for the other along a curve, a relationship laid out in Wickelgren (1977), Speed-accuracy tradeoff and information processing dynamics, Acta Psychologica, and here the exchange rate is unusually visible: a wrong answer costs you the seconds you spent on it and nothing else, so answering fast and missing one in five is often worth more than answering carefully and missing none. What that means is that two people with the same count can have arrived by different strategies, which is a real limitation of any sprint score.

My score jumped ten points on the second try. Which one is real?

Both, and neither on its own. A minute is a very short sample, and the biggest single factor in a first run is the twenty seconds spent working out how the interface behaves — where the field is, that Enter submits, that the pad exists. Beyond that, a promotion arriving at second fifty-five costs almost nothing and one arriving at second fifteen costs you forty-five seconds of harder sums, so the same person on the same day varies by several points on the timing of the ramp alone. Three runs and the middle one is a better figure than any single attempt.

Does the count include the time I spend typing?

Yes, and unavoidably so. The answers are entered by hand, so every correct one costs an arithmetic step plus one to three keystrokes, and on the easy levels the keystrokes are the larger share. That is why the median seconds per correct answer appears beside the score: it is the one figure that lets you see how much of the minute was fingers. If you want a number with the typing taken out of it, no sprint format can give you one — the drill next door reports per-operation medians where the keystroke cost is a constant that cancels out of every comparison.

Where is my best score stored, and can I get rid of it?

In your own browser's local storage, as a single integer under one key, and clearing site data for this domain removes it. It never leaves the tab, it is not readable by any other site, and it does not follow you to another browser or another device — so a best score of 34 on your laptop is invisible on your phone, which is a consequence of storing it honestly rather than an oversight. If your browser blocks storage entirely the sprint still works and simply has nothing to compare against.

What is actually in the link when I share a score?

Three numbers, a seed and a version, encoded so they survive a paste: how many you got right, the level you reached, how many sums you attempted, the seed that generated them and the scoring revision the ladder was on. There is no name, no time, no list of answers and nothing that identifies the machine it was taken on. Whoever opens it sees the score to beat on the start screen. If the ladder ever changes, the revision changes with it and an older link is refused rather than reinterpreted as though it meant the same thing.

Is a good score at this a sign of anything?

It is a sign that you can do small arithmetic quickly, which is a real and narrow skill. What makes it narrow is that it responds to practice — a week of sprints moves the count in a way that nothing about you has moved — and that the count is bounded by how fast you type as much as by how fast you calculate. Nobody should read a sprint score as a measure of mathematical ability, and nothing on this page converts it into a percentile, a grade or an age, because there is no population that has taken this exact ladder.

What a sixty-second score can and cannot carry

The appeal of a one-minute test is that it is repeatable, and the honest way to build one is to admit what that costs. Three things go into a sprint count and only one of them is arithmetic. The first is the ramp: five correct answers promote you, so a run that hits level four spends the rest of the minute on two-digit multiplication while a run that stalls at level two spends it on times tables, and two counts are only on the same scale when both were taken on the same ladder. This is why the ladder is on the page rather than being quietly tuned to make scores feel good. The second is typing, which is why the median seconds per correct answer is printed beside the count: on the early levels the keystrokes are the larger part of each item, and a score is arithmetic plus fingers whether the page says so or not. The third is the strategy you chose, which is a real degree of freedom in every speeded task and not a defect of this one — Wickelgren (1977), Speed-accuracy tradeoff and information processing dynamics, Acta Psychologica is the classic treatment of the trade, and here the exchange rate is visible enough to exploit, because a wrong answer costs only the seconds it took.

Everything else this page could have measured, it deliberately does not. There is no breakdown by operation, no accuracy curve, no error classification and no per-level timing, and leaving them out is the design rather than a shortfall — a person who wants one number to beat is not served by a table, and a table built on a ramped block would be wrong anyway. Inside a ramped run, an operation is confounded with the level it appeared at: your division looks slow because division does not appear until level three, by which time the operands are larger and you have been going for half a minute. That confound cannot be corrected after the fact, only avoided by not ramping, and a block that does not ramp is a different test with a different purpose. The mental arithmetic drill is that test: flat, balanced, twelve items per operation at three fixed operand sizes, and it prices carrying in milliseconds precisely because nothing in it moves while it is being measured.

No percentile appears here and none could: there is no population that has sat this ladder, and a figure invented for one would be the easiest number on this site to believe and repeat. What the page offers instead is a comparison it can honestly support — you against your own best, kept in your own browser, and against whoever you sent the link to. If the sprint turns out to be measuring the wrong thing for you, the neighbors split the problem up: the math aptitude test removes the clock entirely and asks whether the quantities make sense rather than whether the procedures are fast, the numeracy test wraps the same arithmetic in shelf tickets and utility bills, and the numerical reasoning test is the employer format with tables, charts and a calculator. For the other kind of one-minute measurement, the processing speed test takes the arithmetic out and leaves the speed, and the sentence completion test is the verbal equivalent of a short, sharp block of items.

A reaction time here is the interval between the frame that painted the stimulus and the timestamp the browser attached to your key, both read from the same monotonic clock. What neither can see is the display pipeline behind it, so on a 60 Hz screen roughly 16 ms of every figure below is the machine rather than you. That is the timing floor: two numbers closer together than that are the same number, and this page reports no precision it cannot support.

On this page the floor is invisible and the statement is still owed, because one figure here is a time: the median seconds a correct answer took. It is reported to a hundredth of a second, sits somewhere between one and six seconds, and includes the keystrokes — so the frame time is three orders of magnitude below the smallest thing worth comparing, and the score itself is a count that no display latency can move.

This is a measurement exercise, not a clinical assessment. It reports what you did on this page against a stated reference and nothing more — it cannot establish a difficulty with arithmetic, or anything about how quickly you think in general. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.

The one thing this page keeps, and where it keeps it

Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Your answers, your reaction times and your score are never uploaded, logged or kept — which is also why the test carries on working after you disconnect from the network, and why nothing here can be held back behind an email address.

The single exception on this page is your best score, which is written to this browser's own local storage as one integer under one key so the next run has something to beat. It stays on this device, no other site can read it, and clearing site data deletes it. The share link is the other half of the same promise: the numbers travel in the address bar because that way they travel without us storing them.