For parents
CAT4 practice
Your child has a CAT4 coming up and the school has told you very little. Here is what the test is, what the school will see, and how much practice is worth doing.
What CAT4 is
CAT4 is the Cognitive Abilities Test, fourth edition, published by GL Education. Schools give it to a whole year group at once, usually in the autumn term. It is not a test of what has been taught. It looks at how a pupil reasons, which is why nobody is given a syllabus for it.
There are four batteries: verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, spatial reasoning and quantitative reasoning. The non-verbal battery is the one built out of shapes and patterns, and it is the one this site publishes practice for.
CAT4 is published in levels, and the school picks the one that fits the year group. Levels X and Y are for the youngest pupils. Levels A to G cover roughly age 7 up to 17 and over. Parents are not usually told which level their child sat, and it does not change what the questions look like, only how hard they get.
What the school sees
The school gets three numbers per battery, produced from GL Education’s own national norms.
Standard Age Score (SAS)
A score adjusted for the child's exact age in years and months, so a September birthday is not compared with a July one. Around 100 is the average for that age.
Stanine
A band from 1 to 9 that groups the SAS into nine steps. Schools use it because a band is harder to over-read than a number.
National percentile rank
Where the child sits against GL Education's national sample. A rank of 70 means they scored above 70 per cent of that sample.
Nothing here converts to any of those
A practice result on this site is a count of the questions we asked and the ones your child got right. It is not a Standard Age Score, it is not a stanine, and it is not a percentile. We do not hold GL Education’s norms and could not produce one of those numbers honestly, so we do not produce one at all.
How to practise without turning it into a thing
The gain from practice is familiarity, and familiarity arrives quickly. Past that point, more practice does not raise the score and does raise the pressure, which is the one thing that reliably lowers it.
Short sessions, spaced out
Ten to fifteen minutes, two or three times a week, for two or three weeks. That is enough to make the format familiar, and familiarity is the whole of what practice buys here.
Do not show the child a score
Our practice pages report one because an adult asked for it. There is no reason to pass it on. Talk about the questions instead: which one felt slow, which rule they spotted, which one they would like another go at.
Stop when it stops being interesting
Three stop rules that are worth keeping: stop at the end of the time you agreed even if there are questions left, stop after two questions in a row that produce a guess and a shrug, and stop the day before the test entirely.
Sit next to them for the first one
Not to help with the answer. To see whether the difficulty is the reasoning or the screen: reading the instruction, knowing they can move on, working out where the answer buttons are.
The three subtests you can practise here
All three are figure-based, so there is no reading and no arithmetic in them. Every question is original material written by us. Start with whichever one your child finds hardest to describe back to you.
Figure Matrices Practice
A grid of shapes with one cell left empty. The child works out what the rows and columns are doing and picks the shape that completes it.
24 questions · 10 minutes · 5 options · 525 original bank items
Start practising →Odd One Out Test Practice
Nine figures, eight of which follow one rule. The child finds the one that breaks it. This is the fastest of the three and the one most children run out of time on.
20 questions · 5 minutes · 9 panels · 750 original bank items
Start practising →Figure Series Test Practice
A row of figures in order, with the next one missing. The child works out what changes from one step to the next and chooses what comes next.
15 questions · 18 minutes · 5 options · 450 original bank items
Start practising →Questions parents ask
- What is CAT4?
- CAT4 is the Cognitive Abilities Test, fourth edition, published by GL Education. Schools use it to get a picture of how a pupil reasons, separately from what they have been taught. It covers four batteries: verbal, non-verbal, spatial and quantitative reasoning, and is used with pupils from about age 6 up to 17 and over.
- Which CAT4 level will my child sit?
- The school chooses the level that fits the year group. Levels X and Y are for the youngest pupils; levels A to G run from around age 7 up to 17 and over. Parents are not usually told the level, and it does not change what the questions look like, only how hard they get.
- What score does the school see?
- A Standard Age Score for each battery, and usually a stanine and a national percentile rank alongside it. Those are produced from GL Education's own norms. Nothing on this site converts to any of them: our results are a practice score out of the questions we asked, and no more.
- Can you revise for CAT4?
- You cannot revise CAT4 the way you revise a spelling list, because it is not testing recall. What practice does change is familiarity: knowing what the screen looks like, what the question is asking, and what to do when the answer is not obvious. That is worth doing and it takes very little time.
- How much practice is enough?
- Two or three short sessions a week, of ten to fifteen minutes each, for two or three weeks. More than that stops helping. A child who is tired of the format sits the real test worse, not better.
- Should I tell my child their score?
- We would not. Our practice pages show a score because an adult asked for one, and there is no need to pass it on. Talk about the questions instead: which ones felt slow, which rule they spotted, which one they want to try again.
Independent practice material
Original practice material published independently. CAT4 is a registered trademark of GL Education Group Limited. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by GL Education; MatrixReasoningTest.com is an independent publisher. These questions are original content and are not reproductions of, or derived from, actual CAT4 test items. Results are not CAT4 scores and do not convert to a Standard Age Score, stanine or percentile rank.