Clock Drawing Test

The Clock Drawing Test asks a person to draw a clock face, put in the numbers, and set the hands to a given time. It takes a minute or two and needs only paper and a pen, which is why it has been a first-line cognitive screen in primary care, geriatrics, and neurology for decades.

A simple task turns out to require a great deal at once: understanding the instruction, holding it in working memory, retrieving what a clock looks like, planning the layout, and executing the drawing. That breadth is the point — it catches executive and visuospatial problems that a memory-focused screen can miss, and it depends little on verbal ability, which makes it usable with people who have aphasia.

• Clock drawing task, mini-mental state examination and cognitive-functional independence measure: relation to functional outcome of stroke patients

Licensing Notes: There is no single proprietary Clock Drawing Test. The task itself is in general clinical use and is not owned; individual scoring systems are published in the peer-reviewed literature and carry their own copyrights.

Learn More: More than twenty scoring systems exist, from simple pass/fail through the 5-point Shulman method to the 10-point Sunderland method, and research has found that simpler systems generally perform as well as complex ones. The choice matters for comparability: a score means nothing without naming the system.