The Standard Progressive Matricesis the Raven’s everyone pictures: sixty items in five sets of twelve, black ink on white, untimed, for ages six upward. Pearson describes it as a nonverbal test of observation skills and clear-thinking ability. It comes in three editions, Classic, Parallel (item-for-item parallel so the norms carry over) and Plus, which keeps Sets A and B and swaps the middle of C, D and E for harder items to lift the ceiling.
What an item is
A design with a piece missing, bottom right, and the options below. The layout changes as the form goes on: Set A is a continuous pattern with a square cut out, Set B a 2x2 of figures, Sets C to E 3x3 matrices. The option count follows the layout, six on the continuous and 2x2 items and eight on the 3x3 items; Pearson does not publish that split, three practice sites do, and it agrees with the literature’s six to eight.
The five sets
- A, continuous patterns: complete a coherent whole; see continuity, identity and simple change.
- B, analogies between pairs: infer how one figure changes into another and apply the same change.
- C, progressive alteration: track a change that steps across every row and column.
- D, permutations: work out how values are distributed, rearranged or cycled.
- E, resolution into parts: combine, subtract or intersect components to derive the missing figure.
Difficulty rises inside each set and from A to E, and each set has one theme. Those five descriptions are attributed to Raven’s own classification and reproduced in John Raven’s later writing; the one-word names the prep industry uses for them are circulating gloss.
Sources: Pearson Clinical UK, SPM and SPM Plus product page; Yang et al. 2023 (editions, set themes); John Raven, Uses and Abuses of Intelligence (the set table); the six-and-eight split is third-party. Read 2026-09-21. This is independent practice material. It is not a Pearson product and uses none of Raven's items. Figures come from Pearson's own pages and the primary literature; where only third parties state a figure, the text says so.