Grit Test: How Much Passion and Perseverance Do You Have?
The Grit Test assesses passion and perseverance for long-term goals using an adaptation of the Short Grit Scale. Get an instant score and a separate look at steady interests and sustained effort.
Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW 
Grit Test is a free, confidential 8-question self-assessment, based on the validated Short Grit Scale (Grit-S). It takes about 7 minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and gives you a plain-language score across 3 interpretation bands plus an optional in-depth report. It is an educational screening, not a diagnosis.
Two ingredients of grit, measured separately
Grit is defined in the research as passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Those are two different things, and the evidence suggests they do not pull equal weight. This test scores them side by side so you can see which one is carrying your total.
Passion: consistency of interests
Four Grit-S items about whether your interests and goals stay steady over months and years, or whether new projects regularly pull you away from earlier ones. Scored so that steadier interests mean a higher score.
Perseverance of effort
Four Grit-S items about sticking with things: finishing what you start, working hard, and not being knocked off course by setbacks. In the research, this half does most of the predictive work.
An honest interpretation
Grit became famous fast, and the science has been re-examined since. Your result explains what your score suggests, where the evidence is solid, and where a major meta-analysis urges more modesty than the headlines.
| Feature | Typical free quiz | Psychology.com |
|---|---|---|
| Duckworth's Grit-S items, faithful wording | Rarely | Yes, all 8 items |
| Correct reverse scoring of consistency items | Often wrong | Yes, handled internally |
| Passion and perseverance scored separately | No | Yes, side by side |
| Honest about the grit debate | Never mentioned | Yes, covered openly |
| Clinician-reviewed interpretation | Rarely | Yes, clinician reviewed |
| Optional in-depth personalized report | No | Yes, written to your exact scores |
| Confidential (no data sent) | Often tracked | Runs in your browser |
How scoring works
Answers are scored 0–32 in total. Your result falls into one of 3 bands:
| Score | Band | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| 0–13 | Lower grit signs | Your answers suggest your interests and efforts currently move around a lot. That is not a deficit; it is a style, and it has real advantages worth naming alongside its costs. |
| 14–24 | Moderate grit | Your answers show a middle range of grit, which is where most adults score. You can sustain effort toward goals that matter, with some drift when interest fades or setbacks stack up. |
| 25–32 | High grit | Your answers reflect high grit: steady interests and strong perseverance through setbacks. That is a genuine asset, and it comes with a shadow side worth knowing about. |
Grit versus resilience, self-discipline, and conscientiousness
The Grit Test describes how consistently you pursue long-term goals and sustain effort when progress is difficult. Grit is often used as a stand-in for several related but distinct ideas, and mixing them up muddies what a high or low score actually means. Resilience is about how quickly you recover after a setback or loss, which the Resilience Test looks at directly; grit is about staying pointed at the same long-term goal for years, setbacks or not. Self-discipline is the moment-to-moment ability to resist a tempting distraction in favor of a plan; grit is that same steadiness stretched out over a much longer timeline. And as the 2017 meta-analysis found, grit overlaps heavily with conscientiousness, the broad personality trait that includes organization and dependability, so a grit score is partly a narrower, goal-focused view of a trait you likely already carry into other parts of life.
If your grit score is high but you also score high on perfectionism, on the Perfectionism Test, it is worth checking whether your perseverance is serving a goal you chose or a standard you feel you cannot fall short of. A Habit Tracker or a simple SMART Goals framework can turn general grit into steady progress on one specific target, which is usually more useful than trying to feel grittier in the abstract. If persistence is tangled up with anxiety, self-worth, or exhaustion rather than genuine motivation, the Psychology.com therapist directory can help you find a licensed therapist to work through that with.
Choose a goal you still value and describe the next action in observable terms, such as opening the application you have postponed or practicing the skill you want to improve. Also name the support or resources you need. If circumstances make progress difficult, record those constraints alongside your effort. The Psychology.com test hub can help you choose a related self-assessment without treating a personality score as an explanation for every obstacle.
How the Short Grit Scale Is Scored
Consistency-of-interest items describe distraction or changing direction, so their scores are reversed before the total is calculated. Perseverance items describe continuing effort and completing work. A higher total reflects stronger self-reported grit, while the breakdown helps distinguish stable interests from sustained effort.
The original research reports an average, and this page uses a rescaled total as explained in Methodology. Do not compare your displayed total directly with a research average or treat the descriptive result band as a population percentile. The result cannot establish how you rank against people of your age or predict a particular achievement.
Methodology & sources
This test reproduces the eight items of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S) published by Duckworth and Quinn (2009), reworded only for readability. Four items measure consistency of interests, the passion half of grit, and are worded toward changeable interests, so they are reverse-scored; four measure perseverance of effort. One adaptation to note: the published scale is answered on a five-point scale from Not like me at all to Very much like me and reported as an average from 1 to 5, while this screener scores the same five responses 0 to 4 and reports a total from 0 to 32. The order of people does not change, but your total here is not directly comparable to averaged research scores. There are no clinical cutoffs for grit, so the bands are descriptive ranges, not diagnostic thresholds.
We also want to be straight with you about the science. Grit became one of psychology's most famous ideas, and the follow-up evidence is more modest than the fame. A 2017 meta-analysis by Crede, Tynan, and Harms covering 88 samples found that grit overlaps very heavily with the established trait of conscientiousness, that its link with performance is smaller than early claims suggested, and that the perseverance subscale accounts for most of whatever predictive power grit has, with consistency of interests adding little. That does not make the concept useless. It makes this test a useful lens on how you pursue long-term goals, not a measurement of your destiny.
The validation research concerns the published Grit-S. Readability changes and this page's presentation do not establish separate validation for the website's interpretation bands. Because answers are self-reported, use examples from your usual behavior when reflecting on the result, and avoid using it alone for hiring, admissions, or decisions about someone's potential.
References
- Duckworth AL, Quinn PD. Development and validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S). J Pers Assess. 2009;91(2):166-174. doi.org/10.1080/00223890802634290
- Duckworth AL, Peterson C, Matthews MD, Kelly DR. Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2007;92(6):1087-1101. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087
- Credé M, Tynan MC, Harms PD. Much ado about grit: a meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2017;113(3):492-511. doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, September 16). Grit Test. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tests/grit
Grit Test FAQ
What is grit?
Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals: staying interested in the same aims over years and continuing to work toward them through setbacks. Angela Duckworth's research linked it to outcomes like finishing demanding programs and sticking with hard training. It is a personality tendency, not a moral quality, and this test measures it with her validated eight-item scale.
Is grit really the key to success?
The honest answer is: it is one ingredient, and a smaller one than the headlines suggested. A large 2017 meta-analysis found grit overlaps heavily with conscientiousness, a trait psychology has measured for decades, and that its link with performance is modest, with the perseverance half doing most of the work. Skills, opportunity, support, and plain circumstance matter enormously too. Treat your score as a lens on how you pursue goals, not a forecast of how far you will go.
Can grit be developed?
You can practice behaviors associated with persistence, such as choosing a meaningful goal, making the next step manageable, and reviewing progress. That does not establish that a grit-building exercise will raise your score or improve achievement. The cited meta-analysis urges caution about interventions designed to increase grit. Treat goal planning as a practical experiment, and notice whether it helps you follow through while allowing rest, support, and changes of direction.
What is the difference between grit and stubbornness?
Direction. Grit is sustained effort toward a goal that still deserves it; stubbornness is sustained effort after the evidence says the goal or the method no longer does. Quitting well is a real skill: gritty people at their best regularly review whether the target is still right, change strategy when they plateau, and walk away from dead ends without treating it as failure. Persistence plus honest review beats persistence alone.
Can grit lead to burnout?
It can, when perseverance is pointed at chronic overload without recovery. People who pride themselves on pushing through are often the last to notice exhaustion building, and grit can make it harder to renegotiate an unsustainable situation. If your grit score is high but you feel drained, detached, or like your effort no longer lands, our burnout test looks at exactly that pattern. Rest is part of sustained effort, not a break from it.
How many questions does this grit test have?
This test uses all eight items of Angela Duckworth's Short Grit Scale, split evenly between the two grit ingredients: four items on consistency of interests and four on perseverance of effort. Each is rated on a five-point scale from Not like me at all to Very much like me, and you can take the time you need to answer from your usual behavior. Your total score, along with the passion and perseverance breakdown, appears immediately afterward.
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