About the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test
The Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT), first published in 1967, is a group-administered test that measures verbal, quantitative, and figural reasoning to assess a student's general school ability, reporting results as a School Ability Index with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16.
By the mid-1960s the Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Tests (1936) had been the dominant US school cognitive screening instrument for 30 years, but the norms were outdated and the format showed its age. Arthur Otis collaborated with Roger Lennon at Harcourt to produce a thoroughly revised version: the Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test (1967).
The OL/MAT had updated content reflecting 1960s American culture, modernized item formats, machine-scoreable answer sheets, and norms based on a large national sample. The test went through subsequent revisions in 1979 (Otis-Lennon School Ability Test or OLSAT), 1989 (OLSAT-7), 1996 (OLSAT-7 Form R), and 2003 (OLSAT-8, current edition). Throughout this evolution the basic Otis methodology - mixed verbal and quantitative items, multiple-choice format, school-grade-specific levels - has remained constant.
The OLSAT-8 is widely used today for gifted program identification, school placement decisions, and cognitive screening in the United States. It is one of the most-administered cognitive tests in American K-12 education. The lineage from Arthur Otis's 1918 Group Intelligence Scale through to the modern OLSAT is the longest continuous test-development lineage in American educational psychology.
The 5 subtests
Sample Items (Illustrative)
Items are typically presented in a multiple-choice format where the test-taker selects the best option from four choices. Scoring is based on the number of correct responses.
These are illustrative samples, not actual items from the protected test.
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
Arthur S. Otis & Roger T. Lennon (1967). Otis-Lennon School Ability Test.
OLSAT items and current editions are under Pearson Assessment copyright. We document the test's history and its lineal connection to Otis 1918 and 1936.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT)?
The Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, commonly abbreviated OLSAT, is a group-administered test of general school ability first published in 1967. It measures the verbal, quantitative, and figural reasoning skills that relate to success in school, rather than acquired knowledge in a subject like reading or math. It is widely used in United States schools for purposes such as gifted and talented program screening, student placement, and identifying students whose ability differs from their measured achievement.
Who created the OLSAT and when was it published?
The OLSAT was developed by Arthur S. Otis and Roger T. Lennon and was first published in 1967. It descends directly from Arthur Otis's earlier group intelligence tests, including the Otis Group Intelligence Scale of the World War I era and the later Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test. The test has been published commercially by Harcourt and its successors, and the name Otis-Lennon honors both authors.
What does the OLSAT measure?
The OLSAT measures abstract reasoning and problem-solving ability across three domains: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and figural (nonverbal) reasoning. Item types include verbal comprehension, verbal reasoning, pictorial reasoning, figural reasoning, and quantitative reasoning. The goal is to gauge a student's general ability to learn and reason rather than test memorized facts. Because it includes nonverbal and figural items, it can be used with students whose reading skills are still developing.
How is the OLSAT scored?
The OLSAT produces a School Ability Index, or SAI, which is a normalized standard score with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16. The SAI compares a student's performance to others of the same age. The test also reports separate Verbal and Nonverbal scores, along with percentile ranks, stanines, and age- and grade-based norms. Note that the standard deviation of 16 differs from the SD of 15 used by many other modern IQ scales, so an OLSAT SAI is not directly interchangeable with a Wechsler or Stanford-Binet IQ.
Is the OLSAT still used today?
Yes. The OLSAT has been revised over the decades, and the current edition is the OLSAT Eighth Edition, published by Pearson. It remains in active use across United States school districts, where it is frequently administered for gifted and talented admissions, often alongside or in place of achievement tests. Some selective and gifted programs, including certain large urban school systems, have used the OLSAT as part of their entrance screening.
How is the OLSAT different from an IQ test like the Wechsler or Stanford-Binet?
The OLSAT is a group-administered ability test, while tests like the Wechsler scales and the Stanford-Binet are individually administered by a trained examiner. The OLSAT yields a School Ability Index focused on reasoning relevant to academic learning, and it uses a standard deviation of 16, whereas the Wechsler and modern Stanford-Binet use a standard deviation of 15. The OLSAT is designed for efficient large-scale screening of school ability, not for clinical diagnosis, so it is best treated as an ability screener rather than a full individual IQ assessment.
Cite this page
This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS
Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.
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The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.