Logic Tests and Problem Solving

Five tests of working something out, and five different numbers at the end of them.

Logic is the one area on this site where the test can be wrong rather than just imprecise. A reaction time is a stopwatch reading. A logic item is somebody's decision about what counts as the right answer, and that decision is the product.

So every page here shows its working. The common sense test prints the reason under each answer, and no item rests on opinion. The pattern recognition test names the rules a strip was running once you have answered.

The critical thinking test says what settles each argument, and it reports the gap that believable wording opens in your accuracy. The abstract reasoning test lists all four rules a set can be built on, before you start.

The numerical reasoning test writes out the sum once you have answered, and every wrong answer on it is the figure one particular slip produces.

None of the five ranks you against anybody. There is no published distribution for any of these item sets. The pages say so plainly rather than borrow a curve from a test somebody else wrote.

That leaves five honest numbers and five different questions. What you knew, what you spotted and what you accepted. How many you placed before the clock ran out, and what you read correctly off a table.

The 5 tests in this domain

Items answered correctlyCommon Sense TestEveryday questions with one checkable answer each. No clock, no ranking, and the reason is always shown.%Highest level clearedPattern Recognition TestSix tiles follow a hidden rule. Pick the seventh. Every level you clear adds another rule running at once.of 6 Pull of what sounds rightCritical Thinking TestTwo lines and a conclusion. Say whether it follows, even when the conclusion sounds plainly wrong.points Figures placed correctlyAbstract Reasoning TestFive figures. Four of them keep one rule and one breaks it. Twenty sets, one clock over the lot.of 20 Items answered correctlyNumerical Reasoning TestA table of figures and one question about it. The number is what you read correctly, not how fast you did the sums.%

Five tests, five numbers, no overlap

Two tests in one hub reporting the same number in the same unit are one test wearing two names. That is the rule these pages were built against.

Common sense reports a share of correct answers on everyday items. Pattern recognition reports the hardest rung of a ladder you cleared, out of six. Critical thinking reports a gap between two accuracies, in points. Abstract reasoning reports how many of twenty figure sets you placed. Numerical reasoning reports the share of table questions you read correctly.

Take all five and the results will not agree, which is the point. A person who reads a hidden pattern quickly can still accept a broken argument because the conclusion sounded sensible.

Why none of these pages ranks you

A percentile needs a distribution, and a distribution needs a large sample who sat the same items. For everyday judgement, for our six rung ladder, for these arguments, for these figures and for these tables, no such sample exists.

Published research does exist near each of them. Evans and colleagues measured how belief moves the acceptance of an argument. Simon and Kotovsky measured what makes a sequence hard. Neither hands over a curve for a different item set, and borrowing one would be an invented number wearing a citation.

Numerical reasoning is the awkward one, because millions sit it every year. Those distributions belong to the publishers who own the item sets, and none of them is public.

So each page reports your figure and offers the arithmetic instead. Four options mean a guess is right one time in four. Five figures mean one time in five. That is a benchmark we can actually stand behind.

The thing these tests share

Every one of them can be failed by going too fast, and none of them can be passed by going faster.

The trap on the critical thinking page is a conclusion you already agree with. The trap on the pattern page is a tile that matches one you have seen. The trap on the abstract page is the first rule that seems to fit. The trap on the numerical page is a figure sitting in the wrong row.

In each case the quick answer is the one your reading produces before the checking starts. That is worth knowing about yourself, and it is roughly the only thing these pages agree on.

What a score in this hub does not mean

None of these is an intelligence test. Nothing on any of these pages has been checked against any measure of intelligence, so a claim in that direction would be made up.

None of them screens for anything. No score here detects or rules out any condition, and nothing on these pages is a diagnosis. If something has genuinely changed in how you think, decide or remember, that belongs with a doctor.

Practice moves every one of these numbers, and what improves is the task you practised. The item pools are small enough that a second run repeats most of what you have already seen.

The first run is the one worth keeping on all five pages.
A wrong answer here is usually a fact or a rule you had not met.
Your own earlier runs are the only fair comparison we can offer.