Kirnova Cognitive

Each puzzle is a grid of shapes with one square missing, and you pick what fits the gap. There are 36 of them. They start easy and get much harder, and nobody is expected to get them all. One 40-minute clock runs over the whole test, with a minute's grace for a dropped signal. There are no words and no general knowledge, so no schooling is needed.

You get one number out of 100, one word (Low, Moderate, High, Very high), and the range your score could sit in. Hard puzzles count for more than easy ones. There are no sub-scores. You can sit it once every 30 days.

Anyone who wants a straight answer about their own thinking, like a final-year student before placement season, or somebody weighing a change of direction. The score sits on your profile and only you see it. No employer or recruiter is shown it, and it isn't part of TIGER.

Rohan and his score are invented. The words around the numbers come from the real result screen.

• It measures one thing.

  How quickly somebody works out a new pattern against a clock. It doesn't measure knowledge, effort, personality or how good they are at their job.

• The scale is still being set.

  We're still measuring how hard our own puzzles really are. Until then the score is marked provisional and may move by a few points.

• It's a number on the day.

  Tired or rushed, you'll score lower. You can retake it after 30 days. The puzzles are the same, so part of any change may be memory.

• It isn't clinical.

  It says nothing about health, and it doesn't replace watching somebody think through real work.

The format is the Sandia Matrices, a free, open set of matrix-reasoning puzzles built around 2010 at Sandia National Laboratories in the United States, and later studied by a separate team who measured how hard each one is. We use 16 of those published puzzles for the easy and middle part. The 20 hardest are written and drawn by us, because the published set can't tell apart people above average.

Sandia National Laboratories has no connection with Kirnova and doesn't endorse anything we make. The two papers are:

• Matzen, L. E., Benz, Z. O., Dixon, K. R., Posey, J., Kroger, J. K., and Speed, A. E. (2010). Recreating Raven’s. Behavior Research Methods, 42(2), 525 to 541.
• Harris, A. M., McMillan, J. T., Listyg, B., Matzen, L. E., and Carter, N. (2020). Measuring Intelligence with the Sandia Matrices. Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 6(3), Article 6.

The puzzle generator is © 2010 Sandia Corporation, released under the BSD 3-clause licence. The 2020 paper is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.