System Logic Test

System Logic now makes you read the pages, not scan them

The fifteen reference pages have always scattered the numbers you need, so that finding the right page is part of the job. But within a page everything was listed one fact to a line, in the same order every time, with the figure in the same place. You could drop your eye down the column without reading a word of it. That is a lookup table wearing sentences.

From now on some scenarios run their figures together as a paragraph instead, in a jumbled order, with the number falling in a different place each time. Candidates who have just sat the real thing describe exactly this: information laid out through sentences and paragraphs, a lot of skimming and flicking through, and having to remember which page a figure was on. Not every scenario, because they say it is not every scenario on the day either.

The facts are identical either way, so no answer and no score changes. Only the reading does.

You can now see whether you are keeping pace, if you want to

Every timed question test has a bar: a number of correct answers in a number of minutes. Until today that number was only ever shown to you afterwards, on the results screen, and the run itself gave you a clock counting down and a question number counting up without ever saying whether the two were in step.

The briefing now does the division for you. Our bar on Directions and Distances is 48 answers in 16 minutes, which is about 20 seconds each, and that sentence is on the page before you start. There is also a tickbox: turn it on and the run tells you "on pace" or "behind pace" next to the question number, with how many you should have answered by now.

That 48 is our own training benchmark, set deliberately above a competent standard so clearing it here leaves you margin on the day. It is not a published pass mark, and we have no way of knowing the real one.

It is off unless you ask for it, and it is remembered once you do. The real test shows you nothing of the kind, and a rehearsal you have to switch back to being faithful is not much of a rehearsal.

Why it was built: looking at everybody with four or more runs of the same test, people do get faster with practice on almost every test here. On Directions and Distances they barely do, and some candidates are answering at about a third of the speed the target asks for while getting most of what they attempt right. They were not making mistakes. They were running out of time, and nothing on the screen had told them.

One honest limit. The guide counts answers against a bar that counts correct ones, so it is telling you the least you can get away with rather than the figure to aim for. If you are getting four out of five right you need to attempt rather more than the target to reach it.