EQ percentiles: a percentile of whom?

What a percentile is

A percentile is a position in a queue: the 84th percentile means you scored ahead of 84 in a hundred people from the test’s comparison group. It is the most intuitive scale there is, and that is exactly its danger, because the intuition hides the load-bearing part. The number is only as meaningful as the queue.

Who is in the queue changes everything. A sample recruited from a careers site skews one way, a sample of psychology undergraduates another, a sample of people who chose to take an emotional intelligence test a third. None of these is the population. A test that reports "top 10 percent" without describing its sample is reporting a queue position in an unnamed queue, and it is one reason two tests hand the same person two numbers.

Three questions before you trust one

• How large is the norm sample, and when and where was it collected?
• Is it people in general, or people who chose to take this test on this site?
• Does the percentile carry a margin, or is it printed as if exact?

How we handle it

This site does not show a percentile yet, and that is deliberate. We will not compute one until 1,000 quality-passing sittings exist, and when it arrives it will be labelled as a percentile of test-takers on this site, never of the population, because that is the only queue we can honestly describe.

We publish every score as a percentage of its own maximum with its margin printed beside it, and the method is public. The test is free to take; the free result shows your classification and the shape of your profile, and the full scored report, every figure with its margin, is available as a one-off purchase or inside membership.

The rest of this family

Every page here does the same job for a different number: the full set is indexed on the hub.