If you've taken an adult ADHD screener online — including ours — you answered six questions. But if you've ever been handed the ASRS in a doctor's office, or downloaded the official PDF, you may have noticed something: the full form has 18 questions, split into a Part A and a Part B. So what are the other 12 questions, and why do most screeners quietly leave them out?
The short answer: the six questions in Part A were statistically selected to do the screening, while the 12 questions in Part B exist to fill in the clinical picture once screening is done. They're two tools stapled onto one page, doing two different jobs. This article walks through the full 18-question structure, what Part B actually asks, why Part A alone earned the role of screener, and why a Part B "score" isn't a thing you should be adding up at home.
The full ASRS-v1.1: 18 questions, 18 symptom criteria
The Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale was developed with the World Health Organization by a workgroup including Ronald Kessler of Harvard and Lenard Adler of NYU, and published in 2005. (For the full origin story and the validation research behind it, see our guide to what the ASRS-v1.1 is.)
The design starting point was the diagnostic manual itself. ADHD is defined by 18 symptom criteria — nine on the inattentive side, nine on the hyperactive/impulsive side. The ASRS takes each of those 18 criteria and rephrases it as a question about adult daily life, asked over the past six months on the same five-point frequency scale throughout: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Very Often.
So the full 18-item ASRS is, at its core, a one-to-one adult translation of the complete ADHD symptom list. The split into A and B came afterward, and it wasn't thematic — it was statistical.
What Part A asks (the six you've probably seen)
Part A covers six behaviors: trouble finishing the final details of a project, difficulty getting organized for a demanding task, problems remembering appointments or obligations, avoiding or delaying tasks that require a lot of thought, fidgeting or squirming when seated for a long time, and feeling overly active — "driven by a motor."
Four of the six probe the inattentive/executive side; two probe hyperactivity and restlessness. Each question has its own answer threshold that counts as a positive ("shaded") response, and four or more shaded responses out of six is the published cut-point for a positive screen. That scoring system deserves its own explanation — we've written one in What Your ASRS Score Means — so here we'll stay focused on structure.
What Part B asks: the other 12 questions
Part B picks up the remaining 12 symptom criteria. In the official instrument, the questions ask how often you:
- Make careless mistakes when working on a boring or difficult project
- Have difficulty keeping your attention during boring or repetitive work
- Have difficulty concentrating on what people say to you, even when they're speaking to you directly
- Misplace things, or have trouble finding things, at home or at work
- Are distracted by activity or noise around you
- Leave your seat in meetings or other situations where you're expected to stay seated
- Feel restless or fidgety
- Have difficulty unwinding and relaxing when you have time to yourself
- Find yourself talking too much in social situations
- Finish other people's sentences in conversation before they can finish them themselves
- Have difficulty waiting your turn when turn-taking is required
- Interrupt others when they are busy
Read that list and a pattern jumps out. The first five items extend the inattentive picture — careless errors, sustained attention, listening, losing things, distractibility. The remaining seven flesh out hyperactivity and impulsivity, and especially its social and verbal forms: talking over people, finishing sentences, interrupting, struggling to wait.
That last cluster matters. Part A's two hyperactivity questions capture physical restlessness and the "driven by a motor" feeling, but they say nothing about the impulsive side of ADHD — the blurting, the interrupting, the impatience in lines and conversations. For many adults, especially those whose restlessness turned inward long ago, the verbal-impulsivity items in Part B are where they finally recognize themselves. Part B is also where day-to-day inattentive classics live: chronically losing your keys, zoning out mid-conversation, making careless mistakes on tedious work. If you've ever looked at the six Part A questions and thought "this misses half of what I actually struggle with," Part B is the half it was pointing at.
Why Part A alone carries the screening power
Here's the counterintuitive part: if Part B covers so much additional ground, why do screeners use only Part A?
Because Part A wasn't chosen by topic — it was chosen by predictive performance. When Kessler and colleagues validated the 18 questions against full clinical interviews in a US general-population sample, they used statistical analysis to find the smallest subset of items that best discriminated between adults who did and didn't meet criteria for ADHD. Six items emerged, and in the 2005 validation the six-question screener classified cases at least as accurately as the full 18-item version.
That result sounds strange until you think about what screening requires. A screener doesn't need to describe your symptoms completely; it needs to sort "worth a full evaluation" from "probably not" with as few questions as possible. Many of the 18 items overlap statistically — someone who's often distracted by noise is usually also someone who drifts during boring work — so most of Part B's items added description without adding discrimination. The six survivors were the ones carrying independent signal. Twelve more questions would have made the screener longer, not smarter.
This is also why Part B has no cut-point and no official score. You'll find plenty of unofficial "count your Part B shaded boxes" advice online, but the instrument itself defines a threshold only for Part A. Adding up Part B responses and treating the total as a result is using the tool in a way it was never validated for.
So what is Part B actually for?
In clinical hands, Part B does real work — just not screening work.
It maps the full symptom picture. A diagnostic evaluation has to walk through all 18 symptom criteria anyway. A completed Part B gives the clinician a pre-filled map: which criteria you endorse, how frequently, and in which domain. That makes the diagnostic interview faster and more focused.
It shows the shape of your presentation. ADHD is diagnosed with a presentation type — predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive/impulsive, or combined. Part A alone, with its 4-2 split, can't reveal that shape. The full 18 items can suggest it, which the clinician then confirms through interview. (Our article on how ADHD is diagnosed walks through that whole process, including why questionnaires are only one input among several.)
It opens the right conversations. Items like "difficulty unwinding and relaxing" or "interrupting others when they are busy" often surface impairments a patient wouldn't have thought to mention — friction in their marriage, dread of meetings, an inability to enjoy downtime. Clinicians use individual Part B answers as doorways into those specifics.
It provides a baseline. Because all 18 items are frequency-rated, some clinicians re-administer the full checklist over time to track how symptoms respond to treatment — a use where richer coverage beats brevity.
Notice what all four uses have in common: a clinician in the loop. Part B is an interview companion, not a self-test.
Why our screener uses Part A only
Our free adult ADHD screener implements the ASRS-v1.1 Part A — the six questions, the five-point scale, the per-question shaded thresholds, and the published 4+ cut-point — and nothing else. That's a deliberate choice, for three reasons.
First, Part A is the part with validated screening evidence behind it. Its accuracy figures come from published research; a self-scored Part B has none.
Second, an unscoreable section invites over-interpretation. Presenting 12 extra questions with no defined threshold tempts people to invent their own scoring — exactly the misuse the instrument's design warns against.
Third, screening should be low-friction. Two minutes and six questions is enough to answer the only question a screener can answer: is this pattern worth a professional's time?
The bottom line
Part A and Part B aren't a short test and a long test — they're a screener and a clinical checklist that happen to share a page. Part A's six questions were statistically distilled to detect a likely-ADHD pattern with maximum efficiency; Part B's 12 questions exist to enrich a clinical conversation that a positive screen should trigger. Neither one, alone or together, is a diagnosis: that requires a clinician assessing childhood onset, impairment across settings, and the many conditions that mimic ADHD.
If you haven't taken the screener yet, it takes about two minutes, your answers never leave your browser, and you'll get your shaded-response count with a plain-English explanation. And if a positive result leads you to an evaluation where someone hands you all 18 questions — now you'll know exactly what the other 12 are doing there.
If you're struggling and it feels urgent, please reach out now: call or text 988 (US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or text HOME to 741741.
This article is educational and is not a substitute for professional care. Only a qualified clinician can diagnose ADHD. Source: Kessler, R. C., et al. (2005), Psychological Medicine, 35(2), 245–256.