Practice matrices in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices format

The format goes back to a preliminary paper by Penrose and Raven in 1936 and the standard series published two years later, and its design goal was to strip a reasoning test of everything except the reasoning: no words, no arithmetic, no cultural references, just a matrix of figures with one cell missing. That ambition was never fully met — schooling and familiarity with abstract diagrams both show up in scores — but the format got closer than anything before it, which is why it survived into three published forms and into most graduate selection batteries under other names. The word “progressive” is not marketing: within each published set the items are ordered so that solving the early ones teaches the grammar needed for the late ones, and an administration that shuffled them would be a different test.

What made a browser version defensible is a 1990 analysis by Carpenter, Just and Shell, who worked through the advanced form item by item and showed that the whole set is built from five rules: a property constant along a row, a quantitative progression from cell to cell, one figure added to or subtracted from another, three values distributed through a row, and two values distributed with the third position empty. Their two simulation models differed in one respect — how many rules they could hold and manage at once — and that difference reproduced the difficulty ordering of the real items. So the thing a matrix test loads on is not pattern-spotting; it is keeping several partial hypotheses alive while checking a candidate against all of them, and the distribution of two values is the rule that separates people because its third value is an absence, and an absence is the hardest thing to notice. Those five rules are what generates every item on this page, they are printed before you start, and the results panel tells you which of them you lost.

What a browser cannot do is turn any of that into a rank. The norm tables are licensed with the test kit rather than published, and even a leaked table would misplace a visitor today, because the rise in raw performance over the twentieth century was steepest on exactly this kind of abstract item — ≈ 3 IQ points on the conventional estimate, per Flynn (1987), Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure, Psychological Bulletin. So this page reports a count and a profile, and the pages next door take the same generator somewhere else: the matrix reasoning test reports which rule and which complexity level your errors clustered in rather than the score, the abstract reasoning test puts a single graduate-assessment clock across the whole set, and the inductive reasoning test drops the grid for a row of figures and times how long the rule took to find. If you are preparing for a hiring battery, the diagram half of it is usually mechanical reasoning and the prose half is verbal reasoning, and neither is measured by this one.

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.

That floor is negligible here and is stated anyway. An item on this page takes tens of seconds rather than hundreds of milliseconds, so one frame is a part in a thousand of the number — but the same clock is used on every timed page of this site, and a page that quietly changed its story about accuracy depending on how flattering the answer was would not be worth reading on any of them.

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 learning disability, an intellectual disability or giftedness. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the owner of Raven's Progressive Matrices. Raven's Progressive Matrices is a trademark of its owner and is used here only to name the assessment this page prepares for. The questions on this page are our own: no part of the published test is reproduced, and a score here is not comparable to a score from the real instrument.