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 question 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 questions: read a short passage, decide what does or does not follow from it.
• Numerical questions: read a table or chart, do arithmetic under time pressure.
• Abstract or logical questions: continue a pattern, complete a grid, find the odd one out.
• Spatial questions: 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 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 question format, 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 aptitude trainer is the closest match to what an employer sends: timed verbal, numerical, logical and abstract sections, a different paper every sitting, as a 20-minute full mock or a drill for one section. The verbal section is the passage format, a short text and a statement to judge true, false or cannot say, and the numerical section is a table and a calculation, with a calculator allowed. After the clock stops it shows the working for every answer and names the section to drill next.

For untimed practice, the abstract and logical reasoning tests cover the same formats: grids, continuing series, rotations, syllogisms, true-or-false statements and ordering puzzles, with the rule shown after every answer.

We use independent practice questions built around familiar formats. Each page explains the format and links its sources.