How Does the NFL Draft's Wonderlic Test Work?

Along with running the 40-yard dash, lifting weights and showing off their football skills, the prospective recruits at the National Football League (NFL) Draft Combine take an intelligence test called the Wonderlic Personnel Test. Through a mixture of simple math and reading questions, the test is designed to measureanalytical skills, decision making ability and pattern recognition aptitude. But experience has shown it may not actually predict NFL success.

The Wonderlic Test, designed in 1937 by Eldon Wonderlic to help companies decide between job applicants, consists of 50 questions to be answered in 12 minutes. By using questions that focus on patterns, not facts, the test putatively measures cognitive ability, not memorized trivia irrelevant to future job performance.

“In its purest form, the test measures a person's ability to make decisions and solve problems,” Charlie Wonderlic, CEO of Wonderlic, Inc., told Life’s Little Mysteries. “The Wonderlic is testing how a person handles knowledge, not what they already know."

While the questions vary between simple math, reading comprehension, and spatial reasoning, all of the queries have the same goal. Each problem assesses the test taker’s ability to encode visual data, recognize patterns, infer a unifying rule, and apply the rule to see if the answers fit, according to Robert Sternberg, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, and a researcher in the field of intelligence testing. Together, those basic skills underlie analytic intelligence.

Football players began taking the test in the mid-1970s. The test is administered by the NFL itself, which then distributes the results to each individual team. While physical ability and football skill remain the most important factors that teams use to evaluate potential recruits, the test helps to ensure that players have the intelligence needed to understand the sport’s complex play books, Wonderlic said.

Teams have different scoring expectations for players in different positions. Generally, the coaches want higher scores from offensive linemen and quarterbacks, and accept far lower scores from running backs and receivers. However, two very successful quarterbacks, Vince Young, now with the Tennessee Titans, and Dan Marino, formerly of the Miami Dolphins, scored notoriously lowly on the test.

The vast difference between Young’s and Marino’s low Wonderlic scores and their subsequent masterful performances on the field highlights questions over the test’s utility in football.

The Wonderlic Test evaluates analytic thinking, not the applied practical intelligence more essential to playing the game, Sternberg said.

Or, as Wonderlic put it, “Physical skill is paramount, and cognitive ability falls into the category of minimally necessary. Einstein would probably have scored very high on the Wonderlic, but probably had no business stepping onto a football field.”

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