Studying for IQ / Aptitude Tests
What online resources are most similar to what PE firms make you take? What are the questions actually like?
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Career Resources
Private equity firms often use aptitude or IQ-style tests during their recruitment process to assess candidates' analytical and problem-solving skills. Based on the most helpful WSO content, here’s what you need to know:
Types of Questions:
Online Resources:
Preparation Tips:
If you're preparing for PE recruiting, combining aptitude test prep with modeling practice and interview preparation will give you a well-rounded edge.
Sources: London recruitment-can't understand how it works., Private Equity Recruiting Walkthrough – My Experience, Q&A - Infrastructure PE & IBD, Don't get OfficeHours., My PE Recruiting Process
Vista made me take something called like the prep test or something? This was ages ago.
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Depends on the firm. I most recently took the CCAT for a Sr. ASO PE process. In terms of prep, there should be practice tests available online for any of these cognitive tests as well as cheap paid options available to unlock additional tests if you want to properly prep. I don't think it makes much sense to prep beforehand until you actually know which cognitive test you will be made to take given each test's format is different.
The questions themselves are usually standard numerical, verbal, and inductive reasoning. The actual 'killer' in PE aptitude tests isn't the complexity of the logic—it's the aggressive time limit per question (often 30 to 90 seconds).
I learned this the hard way. I practiced on standard paid platforms that only gave a global timer for the whole test. When I took the real assessment, the individual countdowns caused me to panic and completely bomb it.
The key to passing is training your brain to handle that micro-pressure. That exact frustration led me to build a custom platform to fix this. It lets you customize the timer per question, so you can gradually decrease the limit until you're comfortable with the strict PE cut-offs.
Focus on pacing, not just getting the right answer. I can share the link or send a DM if you or anyone else is interested in trying it out.
In the UK, we need to do this for all applications including summer internships
The best resource is called job test prep
It has a collection of tests from all the major providers - you should buy the summer internship pack which has all IB firms and some PE (though the tests overlap)
If you want to speed up your math, the best trick is to have the multiplication tables down cold from number 1-15. This will make you infinitely quicker on math problems
The next website is trader math. As the name suggests, it is for trading but the simpler ones are very good
For logic / patterns, I found them somewhat easy because I played a lot of chess. Might be something worth picking up too
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