Assessment Centre Practice

An e-tray exercise is a digital job simulation. You take on a role at a fictional organisation and work through a simulated inbox of emails, memos and documents within a time limit, deciding what to prioritise and how to respond. It assesses prioritisation, decision-making, written communication and attention to detail. Our e-tray puts you in exactly that situation: a persistent brief, an inbox, a countdown and decisions to make.

They test the same thing. An in-tray is the traditional, paper-based version where you sort a physical desk of memos and letters; an e-tray is the digital version delivered on a computer. The skills assessed - prioritisation, judgement and written communication - are identical, which is why we offer both.

All six of the common formats: e-tray, in-tray, written exercise, presentation, group discussion and role-play. Group discussions, presentations and role-plays cannot be run live on your own, so those scenarios put you through the two things assessors actually mark: the decision you take at each turn, and the note, brief or plan you produce. Every exercise in the library contains written items, so every one of them is AI reviewed.

Decision-based items are scored objectively against an expert answer key that reflects effective workplace behaviour, and you get a per-competency breakdown. Written responses are reviewed by AI against a marking rubric, with a score, strengths and suggested improvements for each answer. Every exercise contains both, so you always get a decision score and written feedback rather than one or the other.

After you submit, your written responses are sent to an AI marker that scores each one against the exercise rubric - for example clarity, use of evidence, handling of risk and professional tone - and returns a short comment, strengths and improvements. It is an educational tool: it is our own automated output and does not replicate any employer’s marking.

As many times as you like - practice is unlimited. The only limit is the AI review of your written answers, which runs up to 3 times per exercise because each AI-scored submission has a processing cost. A review that fails doesn't count towards that limit. Once you've used your 3 AI reviews you can still keep practising the exercise - your decisions are scored as usual, just without AI feedback on the writing. You're shown how many AI reviews remain before you start.

No. Employers and their assessment providers use their own bespoke exercises and marking schemes. Ours are independently written to mirror the common formats and the behaviours assessors look for. Practising the format and timing is what transfers - the specific scenario will differ on the day.

They are used across graduate schemes and professional hiring in engineering, banking, consulting, the civil service, retail and technology, among others. If your assessment day mentions an e-tray, in-tray, written exercise, group exercise, presentation or role-play, this is the practice for it.

Yes, across software engineering, architecture and data science. The engineering set runs a graduate software engineer on-call e-tray, a graduate data scientist e-tray, a launch-date architecture group exercise, a customer data platform group exercise, a release-quality role-play, a customer-data shortcut role-play, an architecture options appraisal and a presentation explaining a machine-learning system to a non-specialist panel. They score what technical assessors mark: quality and security awareness, data and model governance, prioritisation and technical judgement.

Yes, as complete sets rather than one-off scenarios. Finance and banking covers a graduate analyst e-tray, an asset management client operations in-tray, a credit committee memo, an innovation budget group exercise, a client market briefing presentation and a client integrity role-play. The public sector set covers a policy and delivery officer e-tray, a ward coordinator in-tray, a policy brief, a resilience grant group exercise, a minister briefing presentation and a role-play about ministerial pressure on the numbers. Each is marked on the competencies those assessors use, from commercial and regulatory judgement in banking to stakeholder balance and delivery in the civil service.

Usually. Most days pair the exercises with a psychometric test and an interview, and many employers run a situational judgement test as part of the same sift. CogniPrep covers those separately: test formats such as numerical, verbal and situational judgement have their own practice pages, and recorded video interviews have theirs. The exercises here are the assessment-day half of the process rather than the whole of it.