How this screener works

Everything below is what the tool does, why, and where it stops being reliable. If you only read one section, make it the last one.

The instrument

The 18 questions are the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, version 1.1 (ASRS v1.1), developed by the World Health Organization with the Workgroup on Adult ADHD. It is the most widely used adult ADHD screener in research and primary care, and it is free to use.

Items 1–6 are “Part A”, the validated six-question screener. Items 7–18 are “Part B”: they add detail about which symptoms are present but have no cutoff of their own.

How it is scored

The ASRS is not scored by adding up answers. Each item has its own shaded box threshold — the frequency at which that particular symptom becomes clinically notable. Four of the Part A items count from Sometimes upward; the other two only count from Often upward, because those symptoms are common enough in the general population that “sometimes” carries little signal.

Four or more marks in Part A is a positive screen. In validation work the six-item Part A predicted clinician-diagnosed ADHD with an area under the curve of roughly 0.90 — good discrimination for a self-report instrument.

We also show the Part A raw sum against a cutoff of 14 out of 24, which follows more recent scoring guidance. It is a secondary signal here; the shaded-box count is the established rule and the one we headline.

Per-item thresholds

  • 1.counts from Sometimes· IN
  • 2.counts from Sometimes· IN
  • 3.counts from Sometimes· IN
  • 4.counts from Often· IN
  • 5.counts from Often· HI
  • 6.counts from Often· HI
  • 7.counts from Sometimes· IN
  • 8.counts from Often· IN
  • 9.counts from Sometimes· IN
  • 10.counts from Often· IN
  • 11.counts from Often· IN
  • 12.counts from Sometimes· HI
  • 13.counts from Often· HI
  • 14.counts from Often· HI
  • 15.counts from Often· HI
  • 16.counts from Sometimes· HI
  • 17.counts from Often· HI
  • 18.counts from Sometimes· HI

Why we ask four extra questions

Symptom frequency is only DSM-5 Criterion A. The other four criteria decide as much or more: symptoms present before age 12, showing up in two or more settings, causing genuine impairment, and not better explained by another condition.

Skipping them is the single biggest flaw in online ADHD quizzes. A person who is chronically sleep-deprived will produce a textbook positive ASRS. So will someone in a depressive episode, or with untreated anxiety, or an undertreated thyroid. The four context questions won't settle it, but they'll tell you which conversation to have.

Privacy

There is no server, no account, and no database. Scoring runs in your browser. Your answers are encoded into the results page URL — that is how the results survive a refresh and how you can bookmark them. If you copy that link and send it to someone, you are sending them your answers; nothing else transmits them.

Where this stops being reliable

  • It is a screener, not a diagnostic test. It is deliberately tuned to over-refer: it would rather flag someone without ADHD than miss someone with it. A positive result means “worth assessing”, and nothing more.
  • It is validated for adults — roughly 18 and over. It is not appropriate for children; a clinician would use the Vanderbilt or Conners scales with parent and teacher input instead.
  • It relies on you rating your own behaviour. People with ADHD often underestimate their symptoms, and people who have read a lot about ADHD often overestimate them. Neither is dishonesty; both distort the score.
  • It cannot distinguish ADHD from the conditions that mimic it — autism, anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disorders, chronic pain, or the plain cognitive cost of a stressful few months.
  • A negative result does not rule ADHD out, particularly if you have built a life full of coping strategies, or if your presentation is predominantly inattentive.

Sources

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