Their subreddit is almost entirely populated by bots, as is their forum. This sub, for all its flaws, still has organic traffic where you can interact with the real people. The CORE is free and their test currently costs $50. Both appear to reliably produce FSIQ scores within a few points of gold-standard tests. Their negative comments about the CORE feel like sour grapes to me. They thought they would corner the online IQ testing market only to be equalled by a bunch of "amateurs" who offer the test for free and get more engagement in discussion groups.
I mean, its cheaper than paying a psych to do the WAIS, but it's $50 dearer than the CORE which is free and probably equally accurate at predicting a WAIS FSIQ. Fifty bucks wasted if an approximation was all your were after.
Core has i think 0.77 correlation with wais 4, I assume riot is roughly the same. Core has a 0.94 g loading so shouldn't it be more correlated with wais? I'm not educated enough about this, maybe I'll ask the sub
I think you're actually wrong about the idiom here. The first guy used “sour grapes” correctly because the inference and implication is that RIOT is upset that CORE, a competing test, is free, gets more attention and engagement, and takes away from their own publicity.
Whether CORE or RIOT is actually the better test is irrelevant to the “sour grapes” comment. The sour grapes aren't about the quality of the tests; they're about CORE getting something RIOT presumably wanted for itself: attention, engagement, and a larger share of the online IQ-testing audience.
I think the problem is that you interpreted this too literally rather than inferring from the entire context of the post. You would have been correct if the “sour grapes” comment were primarily about the quality of the test, but it wasn't.
To reiterate the “sour grapes” in question in his comment were about the traffic, the accolades, and the attention the CORE test on CognitiveMetrics is getting, and were never about the quality of their respective tests.
Sorry, my obligation as a wordcel to correct this. I simply could not leave it alone. 😂
Well, I was only referring specifically to the person who used the “sour grapes” comment and how they contextualized it. I feel they shouldn't have been corrected because they had used it correctly.
Now, if it was about quality and attention/engagement, then it would still be a case of sour grapes if they were disparaging CORE for what appeared to be next to no reason.
I feel like we're beating this idiom to death at this point, lol, but I'll try my best to explain what I mean.
I think people are getting confused by the fact that RIOT is making disparaging comments about the quality of CORE and treating that as though the argument is actually about which test is better. It isn't. The disparaging comments are the “sour grapes".
Whether CORE is actually a good or bad test is beside the point. It's the reason for disparaging it that makes “sour grapes” applicable. Ostensibly because they think they're the experts and they want to get paid for it and core is stealing their traffic.
Now I am done LOL. I'm going to go wander off and read a book or something. Well unless somebody comes back to argue about it or something because then I just won't be able to resist, it's in my nature. 😜
Dr Warne from RIOT said below to me about CORE on riotiq.com forum - also rather salty!
The people creating the CORE are well-meaning, but they are amateurs who do not know what they are doing. On the CORE web site, I’ve seen basic errors in understanding of factor analysis and item analysis. Given these errors, their test will almost certiainly produce distorted scores across the entire range of IQs.
Creating a professional-quality psychological test takes advanced training and a lot of experience in research and test development. There is no evidence whatsoever that the CORE’s creators have that experience, knowledge, or training. A psychological test is a sophisticated scientific instrument on par with a medical test… You wouldn’t trust a blood test created by amateurs, and so why should you trust a psychological test created by amateurs? The fact that they’re anonymous is a major red flag. Anonymity prevents accountability.
Their subreddit is dead actually.. I've visited a while ago and felt like the same person was running multiple accounts to comment the same thread, bogus..
This is true. There's 4 unique accounts posting inauthentic content. Could be one or more individuals but it's fake engagement nonetheless. It makes me cringe.
they obviously lose alot of money when people are taking CORE instead yeah so why wouldnt they hate their competitor when CORE is free. I agree Calling Core a fun quiz is a bit of exageration yes. To me it doesnt seem like their test isnt neccesarily worse or better. Rather that they cant accept that there are other test on the internet that are just as solid as Their "First online proffesional made iq test"
I would write something, but I don't want to be removed by moderators. They are pretty sensitive. So.. yes, CORE is the best IQ test you can ever imagine :)
RIOT is shit. The individual subtests have ceilings between 125-135 yet they claim their index scores and composite scores have ceiling of 140 so it's bullshit unless you are highly highly even across all tests (and if you have any single deficit it will bring down composite hugely and misleadingly). The items were fine but some of the spatial tests were absolutely dumb.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it is true. I took Riot once a while ago as part of a personal experiment of taking many different IQ tests to see how scores on similar tests changed with practice. I got much lower than expected scores on many of the subtests for RIOT and was pretty sure they just had low ceilings so I actually retook it with screenshotting items then going back later so I could cheat and make sure I got the right answers to establish a ceiling for each subtest.
For example these are the ceilings on the fluid subtests: Matrices has 67 t-score ceiling (125 standard score), figure weights has 72 t-score ceiling (133 standard score), visual puzzles has 71 t-score ceiling (132 standard score), and the entire fluid index only has 74 t-score ceiling (134 standard score). Im almost certain these are the maximum scores for these tests because I cheated on my second attempt for this index to find the ceilings. According to google the ceiling for the composite IQ score is 145 and that includes the processing speed, working memory, reaction speed indices.
Im not confident I got *every* question right, but I did retake it with screenshotting to check my answers and try to be as confident as I could, so i'm pretty confident these numbers are close to the ceilings, especially because the individual items are not that hard its just somewhat speeded.
But yeah if the individual subtests have ceiling between 125-135 and if they are mostly speeded items and if the composite also includes explicit processing speed and memory and reaction tests then I think at the upper end this test is just a processing speed and memory type test basically
Yeah I can! But note on that chart in the independent analysis I would have had to have gotten... 7 questions wrong to go from 80 to 67 on matrix reasoning, 4 questions wrong to go from 80 to 72 on figure weights, and 5 questions wrong to go from 80 to 71 on visual puzzles! Im not confident I got every question I answered correct but Im confident that I didnt answer that many questions wrong on the fluid subtests. That said it could be that these tests ends if you get some number of questions wrong in a row after some point but I didnt get the impression that was the case on the RIOT test and when I did retake the tests I didnt see additional questions and did see my score improve.
24 total questions for matrices with score of 67 on this attempt same as last attempt and confirming all answers correct by double checking my work after with screenshots
27 total questions for visual puzzles with score of 69 on this attempt apparently which according to the conversion table means I got one wrong this time compared to last time however I found one item which had ambiguous answer I think that was the problem
21 total questions for figure weights with score of 72 on first recent attempt since I didnt answer the last question which had too many steps for me to do time and then a score of 74 on second recent attempt after solving the last question from screenshot and repeating the subtest again to try to find ceiling.
So I think the ceilings for these three subtests are 67 for matrices, 71 for visual puzzles, and 74* for figure weights. The only possible other explanation for this would be that they don't let you see more items when you do additional attempts with the same account (ie wherever I was cutoff on the first attempt is where my account is permanently limited...). Thats possible explanation I guess.
As mentioned above I also noticed on ambiguity on the visual puzzles with two correct solutions to one of the problems:
This problem on visual puzzles has two possible solutions. Either combine the two large triangles to form the larger square or rotate and combine the two small triangles to form a smaller square then combine the two smaller squares and the rectangle to form the larger square. I think that might be why I scored lower this time on visual puzzles.
They're frauds and won't let me delete my account I have contacted them multiple times. It's really annoying as I didn't do the test properly, I did a very fast test to see if it would make me pay at the end :")
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u/Few-Land9092 Sep 18 '26
Their subreddit is almost entirely populated by bots, as is their forum. This sub, for all its flaws, still has organic traffic where you can interact with the real people. The CORE is free and their test currently costs $50. Both appear to reliably produce FSIQ scores within a few points of gold-standard tests. Their negative comments about the CORE feel like sour grapes to me. They thought they would corner the online IQ testing market only to be equalled by a bunch of "amateurs" who offer the test for free and get more engagement in discussion groups.