How to prepare for the CBAT

The one thing that matters most

Familiarity, not practice. On the day, every second you spend working out what a test wants is a second not spent doing it, and the short tests are decided in exactly those seconds. A candidate who has seen the format before starts scoring on question one. A candidate who has not spends the first thirty seconds learning, on a test that may only run for three minutes.

This is why the 10 live simulations matter more than the question banks. Nobody freezes over a multiplication. People freeze when a control moves the opposite way to the one they expected.

A four-week plan

Four weeks of focused work is the core. If your date is further out, spread it: shorter sessions, more often. Aptitude scores plateau quickly and cramming the week before mostly buys you fatigue.

The Premium Plan builds this around your own test date, day by day, from your weakest areas.

1. 1

   Week one: find out where you actually are

   Sit one test from each skill area, cold and untrained, and do not retake any of them. The scores are not the point; the spread is. Almost everybody finds one area far weaker than they assumed, and it is rarely the one they were worried about.

2. 2

   Week two: the controls

   Spend this week on tracking and instrument comprehension, the two that punish unfamiliarity hardest. The goal is not a good score, it is that the control no longer surprises you and the panel no longer needs decoding. Short sessions, several times, beats one long one.

3. 3

   Week three: multitasking

   The hardest to improve and the most worth trying. Work on deciding what to drop rather than on doing everything: the tests are built so that nobody completes every task, and the score comes from choosing well under load. Expect this week to feel bad.

4. 4

   Week four: full runs, then stop

   Sit complete runs end to end, in one sitting, at roughly the time of day your assessment is booked for. Look at the skill-area breakdown afterwards rather than the totals. Then ease off for the last two days: short, easy sessions only.

Where candidates lose marks

• Chasing a question that has gone

  Every timed test here rewards moving on. Candidates lose far more to the three questions they never reached than to the one they got wrong, and a question you have already spent twenty seconds on is usually not one you were going to get.

• Practising untimed

  Working through questions at your own pace builds confidence and measures nothing. Almost every one of these tests is easy without a clock; the clock is the test.

• Treating the multitask tests as several tests

  They are one test about allocation. Doing one stream perfectly while ignoring another scores worse than doing all of them adequately, and people who are strong at mental arithmetic fail this way constantly.

• Memorising practice questions

  Nothing you memorise will appear. On Premium, questions are generated fresh every run for exactly this reason. The free version repeats after two runs, so be suspicious of a score that jumps on run three. A rising score that comes from recognition is worse than no practice, because it tells you that you are ready when you are not.

Practical things, the week before

• Practise on a keyboard, sitting up, at a desk. Not on a sofa with a laptop on your knees.
• Learn where the answer keys are without looking. Every glance down is a question you are not reading.
• Do a full run in one sitting rather than a test here and there. Concentration over an hour is itself part of what is being measured.
• Ease off for the last two days: short, easy sessions only. There is nothing left to gain and a tired candidate scores worse than an underprepared one.

Where to start today

Take the free version of any of the 27 tests, cold, without reading the instructions twice. The score will be poor and that is the point. It tells you which skill area to spend week one on. Each test page lists what it measures and how to approach it, whether or not you have a plan.

Every test’s own tips are on its page. Browse the catalogue.

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