The week before
- Find out which test it is. The invitation, its link or the employer's careers page usually names the publisher; the second lesson of this course tells you what the name means and which form to expect.
- Do the speed round twice, on different days. It is the only thing here that measures picking the right tactic under a clock, which is what the test measures.
- Clear your review queue. A question you missed once and never revisited is the one you will miss again.
- Sit one full timed test three days out, and none the night before. Meeting a new pattern the evening before costs sleep and buys nothing.
The day
- A desktop or laptop with a mouse, a quiet room, and the invitation link open before you start. Phones make the grid small and the options smaller.
- Know which clock you are on: one clock for the whole form, or a limit per question. It decides how you pace, and the invitation or the warm-up screen says which.
- Use the warm-up examples to settle, not to judge the difficulty.
During
- Rule first, options second. Say what changes across row one, check it on row two, then look for the finish of row three. Looking at the options first is how a distractor gets you.
- On a whole-form clock, spend a little longer early: the easy questions are where a careless miss costs the most. Leave the hardest to last and come back if there is time.
- On a per-question clock, a wrong answer is expected; the test is looking for the level where you start to miss. Do not let one hard question shake the next easy one.
- Guess rather than leave a blank unless your invitation says wrong answers are penalised. None of the publishers this site has audited publishes negative marking, and an eliminated option or two makes a guess worth having.
What a score means
- Publishers report a scale score or a percentile against a norm group, and the employer sets its own bar per role. None of the publishers this site has audited publishes a pass mark.
- What you can control is the pattern you recognise fastest. The readiness report in this course shows which ones you still lose marks to.
Format figures come from the site’s verification programme. The advice on guessing rests on the absence of published negative marking in the publishers that programme has read; if your invitation says otherwise, the invitation wins.