ADHD Test

Use the ADHD Test

Free ADHD test using the WHO ASRS v1.1 screener. Answer 18 questions, score Part A against the cut-off of 4, then rule out the four conditions that mimic it.

How to Use ADHD Test

1. Step 1: Answer the six Part A questions

   Part A is the validated screener; items 7 to 18 do not change whether it comes back positive. Each question offers never, rarely, sometimes, often and very often. Answer for the past 6 months as a whole, and answer on evidence — missed deadlines, lost keys, a partner’s complaints — rather than on general impression.

2. Step 2: Watch which option each item starts counting from

   The ASRS is a count of darkened boxes, not a total. Items 1, 2 and 3 count from "sometimes" upward; items 4, 5 and 6 only count from "often" upward. Every option below each question is labelled "in the box" or "outside", and the six pips in the sticky bar fill in as your checks land.

3. Step 3: Complete Part B for the domain split

   The twelve Part B items decide which domain your symptoms sit in. They feed the inattention bar out of 36, the hyperactivity-impulsivity bar out of 36, and the DSM-5 count of how many symptoms in each domain you rated "often" or higher against the adult threshold of 5 out of 9.

4. Step 4: Answer the two DSM-5 questions in the blue panel

   Choose whether several symptoms were already present before age 12, and how many parts of your life they actually damage. These are DSM-5 Criteria B and C, the ASRS asks neither, and a positive screen that fails either one is not ADHD as the manual defines it. The verdict box changes accordingly.

5. Step 5: Set the confounder filter

   Drag the sleep slider to your normal night and tick anything currently true about mood, worry or snoring. Sleeping under 7 hours flags the sleep row. The look-alike table then shows which of the four conditions that score identically to ADHD are live for you, and what separates each one from it.

6. Step 6: Copy the item-by-item summary

   Copy summary exports every one of the 18 responses, which landed inside its box, your Part A count, both domain scores, your two DSM-5 answers and any flagged confounders. Take that to the appointment rather than the score alone — an assessor weighs which items you endorsed far more heavily than the number.

Key Features

• Complete 18-item WHO ASRS v1.1 with the correct darkened-box threshold on every question — three Part A items count from "sometimes", three only from "often"
• Part A scored the way the instrument actually works: a count of boxes against the cut-off of 4, never a total
• The two DSM-5 gates the ASRS never asks — several symptoms before age 12, and real impairment in two or more settings
• Confounder filter flagging the four conditions that score identically: short sleep, sleep apnea, depression and anxiety
• Inattention and hyperactivity split against the DSM-5 adult count of 5 symptoms out of 9 per domain
• Copy or print an item-by-item summary with your context answers to take to an assessment

Understanding Results

How the ADHD Test Is Scored

There is no equation here, and that is the point most reproductions of this instrument miss. The ASRS v1.1 offers five responses scored 0 to 4 — never, rarely, sometimes, often, very often — but the screener counts darkened boxes rather than adding points. Each item has its own box, and the boxes do not start in the same place.

In Part A, items 1, 2 and 3 (unfinished final details, difficulty organising, forgotten appointments) count from “sometimes” upward. Items 4, 5 and 6 (delaying demanding tasks, fidgeting, feeling driven by a motor) count only from “often” upward, because those three behaviours are near-universal at lower frequencies and stop discriminating. The screen is the count of those six checks, and the threshold is 4 or more. Part B applies the same per-item logic across items 7 to 18 but does not change the positive-or-negative verdict.

Two further numbers are computed on this page but are not part of the published screener. The 0–72 total is the plain sum of all 18 responses, useful only for tracking change between re-tests. The DSM-5 symptom counttallies how many of the 9 inattention items and the 9 hyperactivity-impulsivity items you rated “often” or higher, against the manual’s adult threshold of 5 out of 9in a domain for anyone aged 17 or over — 6 out of 9 for children.

Reference Ranges: What 0 to 6 Part A Checks Mean

The instrument has exactly one published line: 4 or more of 6. Kessler and colleagues set it in Psychological Medicine in 2005 against blinded clinician interviews in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, reporting 68.7% sensitivity, 99.5% specificityand 97.9% total classification accuracy. The 0–1, 2–3, 4–5 and 6 bands shown in the results table are our reading for orientation, not official cut-points, because the instrument draws only one line.

Read the two accuracy figures in opposite directions. High specificity means a positive is worth acting on: false alarms were rare in the validation sample. Mediocre sensitivity means a negative is weak evidence— roughly 31 of every 100 adults who genuinely have ADHD score under the threshold, and inattentive-presentation adults cluster in that missed group. The 2017 ASRS-5 rebuild traded some of that specificity for far better detection, reporting 91.4% sensitivity and 96.0% specificityagainst DSM-5 criteria on a 0–24 scale with a cut point of 14.

For the domain split, treat the bars as descriptive. Reaching 5 of 9 inattention symptoms alongside 2 of 9 hyperactivity symptoms describes a predominantly inattentive pattern; reaching 5 in both describes a combined pattern. Neither is a diagnosis, because DSM-5 Criterion A requires a clinician’s judgement on each symptom rather than a self-rating, and Criteria B through E have to be satisfied on top of it.

Assumptions & Limitations

The 99.5% specificity figure came from a clinical reappraisal sub-sample inside a structured national survey, where trained interviewers had already characterised each respondent and other conditions were assessed in parallel. A questionnaire filled in alone, after an evening of reading about ADHD, is a different measurement situation: nothing prevents endorsing items you recognise rather than items you experience, and no online instrument can detect that. Treat 99.5% as a ceiling reached under laboratory conditions rather than a property of your own result.

The larger limitation is what the ASRS never asks. It measures symptom frequency over the past 6 months and nothing else — not when symptoms began, not what they cost, not what else could explain them. DSM-5 requires all three. That is why this page adds a Criterion B question (several symptoms before age 12), a Criterion C question (impairment in two or more settings), and a filter for the four conditions that produce the same answers: chronic short sleep, obstructive sleep apnea, depression and generalised anxiety. A positive screen that fails either gate is not ADHD as the manual defines it, and a positive screen on 5.5 hours of sleep a night is describing the sleep first.

Three boundaries on scope. This version is for adults aged 18 and over; the ADHD Rating Scale-5 and the Vanderbilt scales are the child equivalents and their items are not interchangeable with these. Flagging a look-alike does not exclude ADHD — comorbidity is the norm, with 47.1% of adults with ADHD also meeting criteria for an anxiety disorder and 38.3% for a mood disorder in the NCS-R — it only means the confounder has to be treated before the attention question can be read cleanly. And the ASRS v1.1 is a DSM-IV-era instrument still in wide clinical use, not a DSM-5 one. This tool does not provide a diagnosis or medical advice.

Complete Guide: ADHD Test

An ADHD test that comes back positive is saying something far narrower than most people read into it. It is saying that your symptom frequency crossed a line on four of six questions, over the past six months. It asked nothing about when those symptoms started, nothing about whether they cost you anything, and nothing about the four ordinary conditions that produce the same answers. The instrument on this page — the WHO Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, ASRS v1.1 — is the real one, used in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication and reproduced faithfully here. What follows is the part almost every online ADHD test leaves out: how the two versions of it differ, what a positive actually buys you, and what has to be ruled out before the number means anything at all.

Part A vs Part B: Only Six of the Eighteen Questions Decide Anything

The ASRS v1.1 has eighteen items, and people assume all eighteen are added up. They are not. Kessler and colleagues tested all eighteen against blinded clinician interviews in 2005 and found that six of them carried essentially the whole predictive weight. Those six became Part A, and Part A alone is the screener. Items 7 through 18 are Part B: they change nothing about whether the screen is positive or negative.

Part B is not decoration, though. It is the twelve items that tell an assessor which kindof ADHD they are looking at, and it is what gets read in the appointment. Four of the six Part A items are inattention items and only two are hyperactivity items, so Part A on its own can look positive in someone whose hyperactivity is essentially absent. The calculator above scores both parts separately for exactly that reason — a 5-out-of-6 Part A with a flat hyperactivity bar is a different clinical picture from a 5 with both bars high, even though the screening verdict is identical.

Why Does Item 4 Need “Often” When Item 3 Only Needs “Sometimes”?

This is the single most misunderstood feature of the ASRS, and it is why hand-scored versions and most copycat ADHD tests get the wrong answer. The five response options score 0 to 4 — never, rarely, sometimes, often, very often — but the scale is not a sum. Each item has its own darkened box printed on the paper form, and the threshold is not the same for every item.

Items 1, 2 and 3 — unfinished final details, difficulty getting organised, forgotten appointments — count from “sometimes” upward. Items 4, 5 and 6 — procrastinating on demanding tasks, fidgeting, feeling driven by a motor — only count from “often” upward. The reason is base rates in the general population. Almost every adult sometimes procrastinates on a hard task and sometimes fidgets in a long meeting; far fewer adults sometimes forget appointments outright. The thresholds were fitted item by item to the frequency at which each behaviour started discriminating, not chosen for tidiness.

The practical consequence: answering “sometimes” to all six Part A items gives you 3 checks, a negative screen. Answering “often” to all six gives you 6. That two-word difference in self-description moves you across the diagnostic threshold, which is a good reason to answer on evidence — missed deadlines, lost keys, a partner’s complaints — rather than on impression.

ASRS v1.1 vs ASRS-5: The 2017 Rewrite Most Online ADHD Tests Never Adopted

Here is the thing nobody mentions. The ASRS v1.1 was built against DSM-IV criteria, published in 2005. DSM-5 arrived in 2013 and changed the criteria underneath it. In 2017 the same WHO group published a replacement inJAMA Psychiatry: the ASRS-5, a six-item screener scored as a weighted sum from 0 to 24 with a single cut point of 14, and it outperformed the instrument it replaced. Almost every free ADHD test online still serves the 2005 version, including this page — because the ASRS-5 is not in the public domain in the same way, and because the v1.1 is what the clinician you are eventually referred to will recognise on paper.

Read the last three rows down the column and the real distance becomes obvious. The gap between a screener and a diagnosis is not accuracy — 99.5% specificity is a superb number. The gap is that both screeners answer a different question from the one you came here with. They measure how often symptoms occur. DSM-5 additionally requires when they started, what they cost, and what else was excluded. That is why the calculator above asks you two extra questions the ASRS does not.

What 4 Checks Out of 6 Is Actually Worth at 68.7% Sensitivity

Sensitivity 68.7% means the Part A screener misses roughly 31 of every 100 adults who genuinely have ADHD. That is a large miss rate, and it is the number to hold onto if you scored 2 or 3 and walked away reassured. A negative ASRS is weak evidence against ADHD. A positive is strong evidence for taking it further, because specificity of 99.5% means false alarms were rare in the validation sample.

The caveat that matters more than either number: that 99.5% came from a clinical reappraisal sub-sample inside a structured national survey, where interviewers had already characterised each respondent. A self-administered questionnaire filled in at 1 a.m. after four hours of reading about ADHD is not that setting. Nothing stops you endorsing items you recognise rather than items you experience, and no online instrument can detect it. Treat 99.5% as the ceiling the instrument reached under laboratory conditions, not as a promise about your result.

Worked example. A 34-year-old checks items 1, 2, 3 and 5: forgets appointments sometimes, struggles to organise sometimes, leaves final details unfinished sometimes, fidgets often. Four checks, positive screen. Total symptom score 41 out of 72, inattention 26 out of 36. But she also averages 5.5 hours of sleep because of a newborn, and says the trouble started about eighteen months ago. On the ASRS alone she is a positive. Against DSM-5 she fails Criterion B outright, and the sleep row explains the symptom set on its own. Her next step is not an ADHD referral — it is working out the size of her sleep debt and re-testing in three months. That entire chain of reasoning is invisible to a page that only prints a score.

The Four Things That Score Exactly Like ADHD

Attention is the most fragile cognitive function there is. Almost anything that degrades sleep, mood or arousal degrades it first, and the ASRS cannot tell the difference because it never asks why. These four account for the overwhelming majority of false positives, and a competent assessor works through all of them before writing a diagnosis.

Caffeine Is the Fifth Look-Alike, and It Is Self-Inflicted

There is a fifth worth naming even though the calculator does not ask about it: caffeine. Adults with undiagnosed ADHD self-medicate with it at high rates, and the resulting cycle — heavy afternoon intake, delayed sleep onset, worse attention the next day, more caffeine — manufactures every symptom in Part A within about a fortnight. Caffeine has a half-life near five hours, so a 200 mg coffee at 4 p.m. still has 100 mg circulating at 9 p.m. If your intake is high, work out your actual daily caffeine load before you conclude anything from a symptom score.

A Flagged Row Does Not Rule ADHD Out

Note what the table does notsay. It does not say a flagged row means you do not have ADHD. Comorbidity is the norm rather than the exception: in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, 47.1% of adults with ADHD also met criteria for an anxiety disorder and 38.3% for a mood disorder. The point of the differential is sequencing, not exclusion — you cannot read an attention score cleanly through untreated apnea or a live depressive episode, so those get addressed first and the attention question gets asked again afterwards.

Criterion B Moved From Age 7 to Age 12, and That Redrew Adult ADHD

DSM-IV required that symptoms causing impairment be present before age 7. DSM-5 raised that to age 12and softened it from “impairment” to “several symptoms present.” That single edit is the largest reason adult diagnoses climbed after 2013. An age-7 bar is brutal for anyone recalling their own childhood four decades later, and it systematically excluded bright children who compensated until secondary school raised the organisational load past what they could absorb.

It still has teeth, though, and this is where the calculator’s first extra question earns its place. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition, meaning it is present from development rather than acquired. Concentration that was genuinely fine until age 29 and then deteriorated is pointing at something else — thyroid disease, perimenopause, a head injury, a new medication, long COVID, or the four rows in the table above. A screener that returns “positive” without ever asking the question is answering a question you did not ask.

DSM-5 changed one more thing worth knowing. DSM-IV forbade diagnosing ADHD alongside autism; DSM-5 removed that prohibition, and the two now co-occur at rates far above chance. If the inattention rows in your result look more like overload than distraction, the AQ-10 autism test is a reasonable second questionnaire to run before an appointment rather than after one.

Inattentive, Hyperactive-Impulsive or Combined: Reading the 5-of-9 Count

The eighteen ASRS items are the eighteen DSM symptom criteria rewritten in adult language, nine per domain. Nine inattention items: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Nine hyperactivity-impulsivity items: 5, 6, and 12 through 18. DSM-5 counts a symptom as present when it is rated “often” or “very often”, and requires 5 of 9in a domain for anyone aged 17 or over — against 6 of 9 for children.

That lowered adult threshold is not administrative generosity. Hyperactivity converts with age: the child who could not stay in their seat becomes the adult who sits still through the meeting while feeling like they are running. Items 13 and 14 — restlessness, difficulty unwinding — are where that shows up, which is why they carry lower thresholds than the visible motor items. Adults scoring high on inattention with a near-flat hyperactivity bar are the most commonly missed group, and were the group DSM-IV’s wording served worst.

One honest limit on the calculator’s domain split: hitting 5 of 9 on these items is notthe same as meeting DSM-5 Criterion A. The manual’s wording is more specific than the ASRS paraphrase, a clinician judges each symptom rather than accepting a self-rating, and Criteria B through E still have to be satisfied. Read the count as “which domain is louder and by how much,” not as a verdict.

What to Bring to the Appointment Instead of the Score

Assessors see ASRS printouts constantly and they weigh almost nothing. What actually moves an assessment forward is evidence, and most of it you can gather in an afternoon. School reports are the highest-value item by a distance — “does not apply himself,” “careless errors,” “talks in class” are Criterion B evidence in the teacher’s own handwriting. A parent or older sibling who can describe you at nine is the next best thing. After that: three concrete adult examples with consequences attached, one from work and one from home, so Criterion C is documented rather than asserted.

Bring the confounders too, already answered. Walking in with “I sleep seven and a half hours, my PHQ-9 was 3 and my GAD-7 was 4” removes three of the four rows in the differential table before the assessor has to spend the appointment asking. The copy-summary button on this page exports every item response alongside those context answers for that purpose. Untreated adult ADHD is genuinely under-served — the NCS-R found only 10.9% of adults meeting criteria had received any treatment in the previous twelve months — and arriving with organised evidence is the single biggest thing you control.

Last thing. If your screen came back negative but the difficulties are real, lifelong and expensive, do not file the question away. The instrument misses about three in ten. A screener is a filter with a known hole in it, and the hole is the size of a third of everyone it is looking for.

References

1. Kessler RC, Adler L, Ames M, et al. The World Health Organization Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS): a short screening scale for use in the general population. Psychological Medicine. 2005;35(2):245–256. PubMed 15841682
2. Ustun B, Adler LA, Rudin C, et al. The World Health Organization Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Self-Report Screening Scale for DSM-5. JAMA Psychiatry. 2017;74(5):520–527. PubMed 28384801
3. Kessler RC, Adler L, Barkley R, et al. The prevalence and correlates of adult ADHD in the United States: results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. American Journal of Psychiatry. 2006;163(4):716–723. PubMed 16585449
4. Van Dongen HPA, Maislin G, Mullington JM, Dinges DF. The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness. Sleep. 2003;26(2):117–126. PubMed 12683469
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): diagnosis. cdc.gov

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