Practising for an aptitude test an employer sent you

What the test actually is

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says cognitive tests assess reasoning, memory, perceptual speed and accuracy, and skills in arithmetic and reading comprehension, as well as knowledge of a particular function or job. In hiring that usually arrives as one short test with a hard time limit, mixing three or four item types, sat at home on a link with a countdown running.

It is worth knowing that the employer carries an obligation here too. The same guidance says an employer is responsible for ensuring its tests are job-related and consistent with business necessity, and that where a test screens out a protected group the employer should look for an equally effective alternative with less adverse impact. A test you are asked to sit is supposed to be defensible as a measure of the job, not a hazing ritual.

• Verbal items: read a short passage, decide what does or does not follow from it.
• Numerical items: read a table or chart, do arithmetic under time pressure.
• Abstract or logical items: continue a pattern, complete a grid, find the odd one out.
• Spatial items: rotate or reflect a shape and say which option matches.

None of that needs curriculum knowledge. What it needs is recognising the shape of the question fast enough to have time left to answer it.

What practice changes, and what it does not

The honest evidence is narrower and more useful than "practice raises your IQ". A 2018 meta-analysis of retesting on mental speed tests by Scharfen, Blum and Holling found response times fell by 0.237 standard deviations from a first test to a second, 0.367 by the third and 0.499 by the fourth, without reaching a plateau. People get faster at a format they have met before, and they keep getting faster for several sittings.

That is precisely the thing a timed screening test rations. It is also the reason to practise the FORMAT rather than to hunt for the exact questions: the gain travels with familiarity of the item type, and a test provider who is any good does not reuse the paper.

What practice does not do is make you a different candidate. A score from any free browser test, including everything here, is not a prediction of the score you will get on a supervised, normed, timed instrument administered by somebody else. Anyone selling that prediction is selling something.

What to do with the week you have

• Meet every format at least once, so none of them costs you thirty seconds of confusion on the day.
• Practise leaving a question. Most of these tests are scored on how many you get right, not on how far you got, and a question you sink four minutes into has cost you three other questions.
• Practise under a clock at least once, because working quickly is a different skill from working correctly.
• Read the instructions you are sent for the rules that change the strategy: whether wrong answers are penalised, and whether you may go back.
• Sleep. The retest literature is about familiarity; the rest of the variance on the day is ordinary human state.

Where to practise the formats here

The practice page builds its questions when you open it rather than shipping a fixed set, so a second run is a second set of questions and there is nothing to memorise. Every question shows its rule after you answer, which is the part that turns a wrong answer into something you can use.

It covers the abstract and logical families directly: grids, continuing series, rotations, syllogisms, true-or-false statements and ordering puzzles. For the verbal and numerical families the fixed-bank routes are the closer match, and they report a score out of 100 weighted by difficulty.

One thing this site will not do is name its practice after somebody's product. Those names belong to the companies that own them, their questions are theirs and are not reproduced here, and a page promising "the real questions" is either guessing or infringing. The formats are public; the papers are not.