Practice matrices in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices format

Twelve 3x3 grids with the bottom-right cell missing and eight candidates for it, generated fresh every run from the five rules the published items were found to be built from. No clock on any item. The real items are somebody else’s property and are not reproduced, so what comes back is a raw score out of twelve and a profile of which rules you solved — never an IQ number.

12 matrices, generated fresh for this run from the five construction rules below, four items at each of three rule counts and eight answer choices on every one. There is no clock: the run records how long each item took but nothing is cut off.

The five rules every item here is built from

Constant in a row: One property holds still all the way across a row and changes when you drop to the next row. The easiest rule to see and the one that carries the opening items.
Quantitative pairwise progression: Something countable steps by the same amount from each cell to the next — one more element, one size up, a further 45 degrees of turn.
Figure addition or subtraction: The third cell is the first two combined: either everything that appears in both of them, or the first one with the second one taken out of it.
Distribution of three values: Three values of one property appear once each in every row and once each in every column, in an order that shifts as you go down.
Distribution of two values: Two values are spread across a row and the third slot gets nothing at all. The null value is what makes this the rule that separates people.

Naming the rules in advance costs the test nothing and gives you something to leave with. What makes an item hard is not knowing the list — it is holding two or three of these in mind at once while you check a candidate against all of them.

The worked examples show you the answer and name the rule that produced it. They reach no figure in the result. Answer with a click or with the number keys 1 to 8.

Five rules build every item

Constant in a row: Something stays the same along a row and changes only between rows.
Quantitative progression: Something steps by a fixed amount from cell to cell — one more element, one shade darker, a further turn.
Figure addition or subtraction: The third cell is what you get by combining the first two, or by taking one away from the other.
Distribution of three values: Three values are dealt out once each in every row and column.
Distribution of two values: Two values are dealt out the same way and the third position is left empty, so the clue is an absence.

The list comes from Carpenter, Just & Shell (1990), What one intelligence test measures: A theoretical account of the processing in the Raven Progressive Matrices Test, Psychological Review, who worked through the advanced form item by item and found that five kinds of rule account for how its items are built. Their finding about difficulty is the useful part: an item gets harder with the number of rules you have to hold at once, not with how strange it looks. The distribution of two values is the sly one — its third value is a blank, and a blank is easy to read as nothing. The run is built on that. Four items carry one rule, four carry two and four carry three, in that order, and the result counts what you got right at each level and in each rule.

The wrong answers are built rather than drawn at random. Up to three are cells copied from the grid itself — the one to the left of the gap, the one above it, the center — because repeating a neighbor is the commonest slip on this format. The rest are the right cell with exactly one thing changed, so a tile can satisfy the rule you spotted and fail the one you did not.

Why the result stops at a raw score

An IQ figure is a rank against a standardization sample, and the tables that turn a raw matrix score into one are licensed with the test kit rather than published. A leaked table would not rescue it either: raw performance on IQ tests rose by ≈ 3 IQ points a decade (Flynn (1987), Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure, Psychological Bulletin), and the rise was steepest on abstract items like these, so an old table scores a visitor today against a population that has gone. What the run can stand behind is a count, the rule profile, and the exact probability of reaching your score by guessing every item — one chance in eight per item, printed beside the score.

Untimed is a choice, not an omission. With no clock, a matrix item asks whether you can find the rules at all; with one, it asks how fast you can cycle through them, and the two versions do not rank people identically. The Mensa-format practice set is the timed one here, and if the grids came easily, the block design test asks you to build a pattern instead of choosing one.

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.

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.

What people ask before taking it

Are these the actual items from the published test?

No. The item set is copyrighted, and it is also kept out of circulation for a reason that matters more: a matrix item that has been seen measures whether you have seen it, so publishing the real bank would ruin the thing it measures. What is public is the analysis of how the items are built, and this page uses that analysis as a generator. A score on generated items is not comparable to a published norm, and the result says so beside the number.

Is this the Standard, the Advanced or the Colored version?

None of them. The family has a colored form for young children, a standard form for the general range, and an advanced form built to separate people near the top, where the standard form runs out of difficulty. These generated items run from one rule to three, which spans the middle of that range rather than reproducing any one form — worth knowing before you treat a run here as rehearsal for a specific one.

Can I use a score from here to apply to Mensa or put it on a CV?

No. Admission needs a supervised administration of an approved test, and the criterion is a percentile rather than a score — the 98th percentile of the general population, per Mensa International's published admission criterion — which is why the figures quoted for it on different IQ scales disagree. Nothing taken alone in a browser tab qualifies for anything, this page included. What a run is good for is learning how the format feels and which rule you keep losing.