About the Army Alpha
The Army Alpha is the test that put mass cognitive testing on the map. Designed in 1917 by a committee chaired by Robert M. Yerkes for the U.S. Army, it was administered to over 1.7 million recruits during World War I. The Alpha proved that intelligence could be measured at population scale and became the direct ancestor of every standardized test that followed: the SAT (1926), the AGCT (1942), the ASVAB, the GRE, the LSAT.
The test has eight subtests, designed to be administered as a group examination in about 50 minutes. The first subtest (Following Oral Directions) requires the examiner to read instructions aloud and the recruit to mark a diagram - we have transcribed it for reference but cannot offer it interactively, since it depends on physical diagrams. The other seven subtests are fully scoreable here.
The version below is Form 5, one of five parallel forms (5, 6, 7, 8, 9) used to prevent cheating between batches of recruits. Items are transcribed verbatim from the 1920 Yoakum & Yerkes publication, with answers verified against the original answer keys printed at pages 70-77 of that volume.
The eight subtests
Take the test
Each subtest has a strict time limit, the same that was given to 1918 recruits. The full test takes about 50 minutes with breaks. You can take subtests one at a time or do the full test in sequence.
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The original answer keys + page scans
Every item below was cross-verified against the original answer keys printed on pages 70 to 77 of the Yoakum & Yerkes volume. The page scans containing the items themselves (pages 206 to 219) are reproduced via Internet Archive's open viewer.
About Test 1 (Following Oral Directions)
The full Army Alpha has 8 subtests, but Test 1 (Following Oral Directions) cannot be administered interactively in a browser. The original test had the examiner read 12 spoken instructions aloud while recruits marked symbols on a printed diagram. The instructions and diagram are inseparable - the diagram alone is meaningless without the spoken cues, and the cues are meaningless without the diagram.
You can read the original instructions and view the diagram on page 207 of the Yoakum & Yerkes volume. To self-administer, find a friend to read the instructions aloud while you mark a printed copy of the diagram.
How the original scoring worked
In 1918, raw scores on the Alpha were converted to letter ratings used by Army personnel officers:
The letter rating combined the alpha score with examiner observations and was not solely determined by raw test performance. Modern readers should view the letter classifications as historical artifacts; they reflect 1918 institutional values and use language that would not be acceptable today.
Source and verification
All test items, options, and answer keys on this page are transcribed from:
Yoakum, C. S. & Yerkes, R. M. (1920). Army Mental Tests. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Published by direction of the War Department. 303 pp.
This publication is in the public domain in the United States (published before 1929, also authorized by the U.S. War Department). Items were transcribed in 2026 by combining OCR with manual verification against page scans hosted by the Internet Archive. We cross-checked each item's correct answer against the printed answer keys on pages 70-77 of the original volume.
If you spot an error in any item or answer, contact us - we will verify against the source and correct.
Want a modern, scored IQ test?
The Army Alpha is a historical artifact. For a contemporary score calibrated to today's population, take our modern full IQ test - it uses a current item bank, modern scoring conventions (mean 100, SD 15), and gives a confidence interval.
Take the Modern IQ Test