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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

Here's an online version of the Wonderlic test. There's a "start quiz" button at the very bottom.

https://beatthewonderlic.com/take-a-free-wonderlic-test-onli...

I was fairly surprised by it. I've tested well on standardized tests and IQ tests my entire life, so I assumed I would also test well here. Especially since I saw the test was also biased towards verbal understanding, which is my strong suit.

Not so! My score was fairly low. The questions, individually, are trivial, but I ran out of time fairly early on in the test. I think you'd have to be a quick reader and good at mental calculations to score highly on this test.

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While I did well enough, there were a couple questions that brought me back to my horrors in engineering school. Specifically, 'if you fold this, what touches what.'. I'm completely incapable of doing this, and don't know why. I quit classes in my mech Eng course because they'd ask to take an abstract shape, transform it somehow, and draw it. I couldn't and it's probably the first time I'd felt helpless. Luckily I haven't needed that skill again, until now!

Yeah I had the same experience. It is really strange because speed is one thing people can practice for. Thus, many intelligence type tests try to give you more time per question so that speed isn't that much of a deciding factor.

But, yeah if anyone needs to take this test for an important job keep in mind that if you practice a lot, your speed will improve significantly.

Yet it makes one wonder why they will give out an intelligence test that depends so much on practice. Say you are an NFL team trying to select a QB ... do you want to give credit to the QB that spent most time practicing for the wonderlic?

I think perhaps, the company that offers the test has decided to make the most money from training people to take the test and thus have crafted a test that depends so much on practice.

I wonder how much of success on this test is knowing when to take educated guesses or skip questions? Since I saw you say you ran out of time, I made sure to make a quick guess at the ones that seemed a bit more complicated so that I could finish the test. I did pretty well (38/50, or 90% "LIKELIHOOD OF JOB OFFER").

More importantly, though... I don't understand why anyone is hiring based on this test. It's incredibly hard, and I don't know what it really shows about a person.

It is surprisingly hard. The mental arithmetic killed me, I'm just not fast enough at it. Still apparently too smart to be a cop...

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I've always tested well and score around 120-130 on most online IQ tests. Going in knowing that the test was designed not to be finished, I prioritized speed over accuracy. I answered 49/50 questions and got a score of 39, which is quite a bit higher than I expected going in.

Ditto. I score 98+ percentile on SAT, GRE, etc., but only 50th percentile on this. Ran out of time on question 34 of 50.

I didn't take advantage of scratch paper and pencil, which would have helped. Or pay much attention to the timer. I'm sure I could get my score up, with some work, but not that much.

Remember, those were recentered in 1995.

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