Aon cut-e Tips: How Negative Marking Should Change What You Do

Almost every assessment provider scores you on how many questions you get right, which makes guessing free. Aon does not. On the cut-e aptitude tests a wrong answer deducts a mark and an unanswered question deducts nothing, and that one rule should change more about how you sit the test than any amount of practice on the question types.

The arithmetic, and the rule it gives you

That is a memorable rule and it is stricter than it sounds: answer only when you are more likely to be right than wrong. On a three-option item, a blind guess sits at 33 percent and loses you a third of a mark on average. Eliminating one option takes you to 50 percent, which is break even and gains you nothing. Partial elimination, the tactic that works everywhere else, is worthless here. You have to actually resolve the item.

Not finishing is the design, not a failure

Aon tests run on a single global clock, usually 5 to 12 minutes, and deliberately contain more items than nearly anyone completes. There is no score for reaching the end. Candidates who try to sweep the whole paper end up guessing in the last two minutes, which under negative marking actively destroys the marks they earned earlier.

scales verbal and scales numerical: the tabs are the test

Both tests spread their source material across tabbed documents, and you judge each statement as True, False or Cannot Say. Locating the right figure is not incidental difficulty, it is a large part of what is being measured, and it is where the twelve minutes go.

• Read the statement first, then choose one tab. Reading all the tabs is the single most common way to run out of time. Decide which document could possibly settle the statement, open that one, and ignore the rest.
• Treat Cannot Say as a first-class answer. Under negative marking it is tempting to see Cannot Say as a safe hedge. It is not safe. It is wrong, and costs a mark, whenever the documents do settle the question. It is right, and earns a mark, whenever they do not. Judge it on the same evidence standard as the other two.
• Skip on locating cost, not just on difficulty. If you have spent twenty seconds and still cannot find where the relevant number lives, the item is not going to resolve in your favour. Leave it.

scales ix: fifteen seconds and a single salient feature

scales ix shows nine objects, eight of which obey a hidden rule, and asks you to click the one that breaks it. It runs about five minutes at roughly fifteen seconds an item, and it is negatively marked like everything else.

At that pace you cannot test hypotheses systematically. Scan for the most salient dimension first, usually colour, count or orientation, and see whether one object is alone on it. If nothing separates after about ten seconds, skip. On a test this fast, the cost of a skip is tiny and the cost of a wrong answer is a full mark.

scales cls: find the difference, not the commonality

scales cls shows two groups of grids, each group following a different hidden rule, and asks which group an unmarked grid belongs to. Twelve minutes, negatively marked.

The instinct is to work out what the members of group one have in common. That is slow, because groups usually share several incidental features. The faster route is to find the one dimension on which the two groups differ, since that is necessarily the rule that separates them, and then check the unmarked grid on that dimension alone.

The smartPredict challenges

smartPredict is Aon's gamified suite. The three you are most likely to meet run about six minutes each.

switchChallenge

A row of symbols passes through hidden operator codes that rearrange it, and you work out the missing code. The tactic that helps most is to stop tracking symbols and start tracking positions. A code is a permutation, so what you need is the mapping from slot to slot, and once you write that down the symbols themselves stop mattering. Where the missing code sits at the end of the chain, work backwards from the output instead of forwards from the input.

gridChallenge

Cells light up in sequence and you reproduce them, but between rounds you have to judge whether a pattern is symmetrical. The symmetry task is not a break, it is the difficulty: it exists to overwrite what you are holding in memory.

Encode the sequence as a shape or a path rather than as a list of cells, because a shape survives interference much better than a list does. Then answer the symmetry question fast and without deliberating; every extra second spent on it is a second your memory trace is decaying.

digitChallenge

You complete arithmetic equations by dropping in missing digits, using each digit from one to nine only once per equation. Start with the most constrained equation rather than the first one, because solving it removes digits from the pool and often forces the rest. Multiplication and division constraints are usually tighter than addition ones, so they are the best place to start.

Rehearse the skip, because it does not come naturally

Everything in your education has trained you to attempt every question. Under negative marking that reflex is a liability, and knowing the rule intellectually is not the same as being able to execute it while a clock runs. It is worth sitting a full negatively marked practice test specifically to watch how many marks you hand back through optimistic answers, because the number is usually larger than people expect.

Do not carry the habit anywhere else

Aon is the exception, not the pattern. The Criteria CCAT has no wrong-answer penalty and Criteria's own advice is to guess and move on. Talent Q has no penalty either. If you are running two processes at once, label the habit in your head by employer, because skipping on a test with no penalty is pure lost marks.