Screening Quiz for Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms

Identify symptoms of adult ADD/ADHD using this 24-question self-test by Jasper and Goldberg. To test for additional mitigating factors which may preclude a diagnosis of ADHD, see our newer “Structured Adult ADHD Self-Test (SAAST): Test Yourself for ADHD”.

Completing this Psychological Screening Test

To take the questionnaire, please click the radio button next to the selection which best reflects how each statement applies to you. The items below refer to how you have felt and behaved during most of your adult life. If you have usually been one way and recently have changed, your response should reflect how you have usually been.

See below for an important note on significant limitations of this test.

Take the Quiz

Please note: This test will only be scored correctly if you answer each one of the questions. Please also check our disclaimer on psychological testing and our psychological testing privacy guarantee.

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About Scoring this Psychological Questionnaire

Scoring:

• 0 points Not at all
• 1 point Just a little
• 2 points Somewhat
• 3 points Moderately
• 4 points Quite a lot
• 5 points Very much

This is a screening examination for adult ADD. It is not a diagnostic test. Scores over 70 are associated with a high probability of ADD. The diagnosis of ADD can only be made on the basis of a detailed history and mental status examination. High scores on this examination may result from anxiety, depression or mania. These conditions must be ruled out before a diagnosis of Adult ADD can be made.

This section also includes a screening quiz for mania (“Mania Screening Quiz: The Goldberg Mania Questionnaire”), depression (“Depression Tests”) and one for anxiety and depression (“K10 Anxiety and Depression Test”).

When your quiz is scored, one of 2 different information pages will appear to describe the results for scores in your range, along with further details of how your score was computed.

Import Caveats: Flaws in the Jasper-Goldberg ADD/ADHD Test

Back in 1990, when this screening test first appeared (later spreading to every corner of the internet with even the faintest interest in ADD/ADHD), the diagnosis of the disorder was a little different than it is now. Unfortunately, even after all these years, the test still has not been updated to overcome what can now be recognized as severe flaws:

Failure to take separate account of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity

An actual diagnosis of ADD/ADHD requires the presence of two distinct components — both inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity — which this test combines into one monolithic score.

Failure to check for mitigating factors which preclude the diagnosis of ADHD

Not only is it incorrect to link a diagnosis of ADHD to a total number of symptoms without differentiating between the types of symptoms, but it is even more incorrect to make that link without checking for factors which preclude the diagnosis altogther. This test does not check for those precluding factors.

(For the mathematically eagle-eyed: yes, of course it is true that we can still claim an overall correlation between higher overall scores and higher probabilities of ADHD diagnosis. But this masks the fact that for a subset of those higher scores — those where only inattention or hyperactivity/impulsivity is present and the other is absent — the probability of a correct ADHD diagnosis is zero.)

Despite these flaws, the Jasper-Goldberg test remains popular, and we include it here in this section for the sake of completeness. Give it a whirl, but beware of its limitations. For a more modern alternative, you may also want to try the “Structured Adult ADHD Self-Test (SAAST): Test Yourself for ADHD”.

Additional Information

This adult ADHD screening test was developed by and is Copyright 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 Larry Jasper & Ivan Goldberg.

• ADHD
• screening