How to spot a fake or paywalled IQ test

How the paywall pattern works

1. The questions are free, and the page promises an instant result.
2. After the last question you are told your result is ready, then asked for an email address or a card.
3. A small fee unlocks the result, often one or two dollars.
4. The fine print turns that fee into a trial that renews as a monthly subscription. In consumer reviews of these sites, a recurring charge of around thirty dollars a month that the buyer did not expect is a common complaint.

Charging for a test is not wrong in itself. The problem is a price that appears only after the work is done, and a subscription that is easy to miss and hard to cancel.

Eight warning signs

• The result is held back until you pay or give an email. A test that is genuinely free shows the result first.
• A short test gives an exact IQ. A dozen questions cannot pin a score to one number. One widely cited checklist treats fewer than 20 questions, or under 15 minutes, as a warning sign.
• One number, no range. Every test has measurement error. A result such as “IQ 127” with no range around it hides that.
• Almost everyone scores high. On a properly normed scale (average 100, standard deviation 15) only about 2% of people score above 130. A test that tells most takers they are gifted is flattering, not measuring.
• One kind of question, a “full” IQ. A test of matrix puzzles alone measures one ability. Reporting it as a full IQ overstates what it can show.
• Nobody is named. No author or organisation, and no page explaining how the score is calculated or what it is compared against.
• Claims it cannot back. “Clinically validated”, “certified”, or “accepted by Mensa”. American Mensa does not accept unsupervised internet tests at all.
• A promise to raise your IQ. Practice reliably improves scores on the kinds of question you practise, by roughly eight points on a retaken reasoning test in one review, but the gains do not carry over to unfamiliar tasks. In 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission fined a well-known brain-training company $2 million over claims like this.

Signs of a test worth taking

• It tells you the number of questions and the time limit before you start.
• It covers at least three kinds of reasoning, such as abstract, numerical, verbal and spatial.
• It enforces its timer, because norms assume everyone had the same time.
• It reports a range (a confidence interval) and says what the range means.
• It explains its method: how answers are scored, what the score is compared against, and how reliable it is.
• It states its limits plainly: not a clinical assessment, and not a route into Mensa.
• The result is free to see, before any offer.

A one-minute check before you start

1. Scroll to the footer. Is there a methods page, a named organisation and a privacy policy?
2. Look for the words “trial”, “subscription”, “renews” or “membership” near the start button or in the terms.
3. Check that the page states the number of questions and the time.
4. Search the site's name with the word “reviews” and read the one-star ones: billing complaints show up fast.
5. If a card is asked for before the result, stop. You have lost only the time.

If you have already paid

1. Check your card or bank statement for a recurring charge, and note the merchant name as it appears there.
2. Cancel from the site's account page if there is one, and keep a screenshot or email of the cancellation.
3. If you cannot cancel, contact your card issuer or bank. They can stop future charges and tell you whether you can dispute past ones.
4. Report it to your national consumer protection agency. In the US that is the Federal Trade Commission, at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

How The IQ Gym measures up

We make an online test, so here is ours against the same list, including where it falls short.