What every one of them shares
A 3x3 grid of figures, the bottom-right cell missing, and a row of options below. Rows and columns follow a rule, or two, and the option that completes the grid is the one the rule predicts. There are no words, no arithmetic and nothing to recall, which is why employers use it: it measures how quickly you find structure in something you have never seen. Difficulty rises through the form, so the first questions are the ones a careless miss costs most on.
Two clock models
One clock for the whole form. The classic shape: a fixed number of questions and a total time, and you decide how to spend it. The classic Matrigma, for example, is 30 questions in 40 minutes; SHL’s inductive test is up to 15 questions in 18 minutes for the whole test. On this model the skill is pacing: a little longer on the early questions, the hardest left to last, and a guess rather than a blank at the end.
A clock per question. The adaptive shape: each question has its own time limit and the next one is chosen from how you answered the last. The Adaptive Matrigma gives 60 seconds a question for up to 12 minutes. On this model a wrong answer is expected, since the test is looking for the level where you start to miss, and the skill is not letting one hard question shake the next easy one.
Options
Publishers use between four and eight answer options, and the wrong ones are not random: each is built from the grid by breaking the rule in one specific way. That is why looking at the options first is how a distractor gets you, and why every lesson here says the rule out loud before it looks at them. The practice on this site runs four to eight options; where a publisher fixes a different count, its practice page says so.
How a sitting starts
You take it in a browser, at home or at the employer’s premises, from a link in the invitation, on a laptop or desktop rather than a phone. Before the scored questions there is usually a short warm-up of example questions that do not count. Use it to settle: check the screen, find where the options sit, get the feel of the grid before anything is on the clock. Treat the examples as a warm-up, not as a signal of how hard the real questions will be.
The numbers above are read from the site’s verification programme, which records each publisher’s own document and the date it was read. The previous lesson has the full table per publisher.