It's all about being able to do them quickly and accurately. I found personally the best preparation was doing lots of practice ones so that I was familiar with the format and the quickest way to do it. There's a number of good books and websites that you should do under timed conditions.

Once you have done enough too, you notice the same questions coming up again and again too.

 

I'm in Australia and for me it was an SHL test, and you can take a sample one (google them).

Basically you get given a series of questions each with roughly 6 personalities and you choose the two that most and least accurately describes your character. The questions tend to repeat themselves over and over again to see if your responses are "honest"

 

http://www.macquarie.com.au/au/about_macquarie/careers/flash/English_US…

Go to the above link for a sample of the types of questions you'll receive. There's really no way you can prepare for it, except to familiarize yourself with the question format. One tip is that during the actual assessment (for the abstract, verbal and math sections), work quickly but accurately, as most questions will have to be answered in under a minute each, on average.

 

I took one of the tests. I'd go to http://www.psychometric-success.com/ for a good indicator of what to expect.

I had a verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning portion to the test. Verbal was all critical reading like the SATs. Numerical was interpreting information from graphs and making various calculations. This was geared towards financial concepts as you might imagine. Analytical was pattern matching.

It's only difficult because of the time constraints.

The above website has practice tests for each type of section. The verbal and numerical portions were more difficult on the real test, but the abstract reasoning practice tests were very accurate.

 
Best Response

There's stuff about psych tests on efinancialcareers.com, or on doctorjob.com. You can also have practice tests on www.psl.co.uk, very similar to SHL. My advice if you take those: take it easy. Just practice a little bit of each test, practicing 50 times won't make you as fuckin' intelligent as Einstein or give you a 160 IQ. The very important thing is to be in awesome shape, to have had very good sleep the day before, and to keep your brain sharp for the moment when you take the tests (i.e., if you take them @ 2pm, don't fuckin practice twenty times in the morning :) ). If the tests you're taking are the regular online application tests, most of the time they're okay, just move at a breakneck pace between questions, it's pretty tight. And make sure you read the questions correctly as well :)

 

I study maths at university and still struggled with numerical test - it doesn't test actual in-depth mathematical knowledge, just simple operations but under time pressure and stress so I think it's normal to struggle if you haven't practised enough. I recommend registering on Graduates First to do some of the free sample tests they offer. There's plenty of other websites online as well

 

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