Sunita is regarded by her teachers as an excellent student. She does her work on time, scores the highest grades in her class, listens to instructions with care, grasps quickly, reproduces accurately but she rarely comes out with ideas which are her own. Rita is another student who is just average in her studies and has not achieved high grades consistently. She prefers to learn on her own. She improvises new ways of helping her mother at home and comes up with new ways of doing her work and assignments.

Creativity tests differ from intelligence tests in that creativity tests:

Involve open-ended questions or problems

A general feature of most of the creativity tests is that they are open-ended. They permit the person to think of different answers to the questions or problems in terms of her/his experiences, whatever these may have been. These help the individual to go in different directions. There are no specified answers to questions or problems in creativity tests. Therefore, there is freedom to use one’s imagination and express it in original ways. Creativity tests involve divergent thinking and assess such abilities as ability to produce a variety of ideas, i.e. ideas which are off-the-beaten track, ability to see new relationships between seemingly unrelated things, ability to guess causes and consequences, ability to put things in a new context, etc. This is contrary to the tests of intelligence which mostly involve convergent thinking. In tests of intelligence, the person has to think of the right solution to the problem and the focus is on assessing abilities such as memory, logical reasoning, accuracy, perceptual ability, and clear thinking. There is little scope for the expression of spontaneity, originality, and imagination.