Preparation11 September 20267 min read

The Week Before Your Assessment: A Day-by-Day Plan

Seven days, a realistic amount of effort, and an order that puts the highest-return work first. What to do on each day before an online assessment, and what to stop doing.

The ordering principle

Most candidates prepare content first and format last, usually running out of time before they reach the format. Reverse it. Knowing which vendor sent your test, whether guessing is penalised and what the interface does is worth more than another two hours of practice questions, and it takes twenty minutes. Everything below is ordered by return on time spent, not by difficulty.

Seven days is a comfortable amount of time for an online assessment, and most people waste the first five of them. This is a day-by-day plan that assumes about an hour a day, puts the highest-value work first, and deliberately tapers rather than peaking the night before.

Day 1: find out what you are actually sitting

Twenty minutes, and the highest-return twenty minutes on the list.

Read the invitation email properly

Look for a product name rather than a company name. Verify, OPQ32 and TalentCentral mean SHL. scales, smartPredict and switchChallenge mean Aon. Matrigma means Assessio. Cognify means Revelian. The vendor name itself rarely appears; the product name often does.

Check the link domain

Hover over the assessment link without clicking. The test player usually sits on the vendor’s domain even when everything is branded as the employer. sovaonline.com is Sova. That single check settles a lot of uncertainty.

Reply and ask

Ask the recruiter what the assessment consists of and how long to allow. It is a normal, organised-sounding question and it is usually answered. One reply from the employer beats every inference on the internet, including ours.

Write down the guessing rule

The only fact that inverts between vendors. SHL, Criteria and Wonderlic do not penalise wrong answers, so never leave a blank. Aon cut-e scales and the Thomas Aptitude battery deduct marks, so skip rather than guess. Get this wrong and your preparation actively costs you.

If you get stuck, the provider identification guide works through the tells in detail.

Day 2: one full-length timed run

Not sample questions. The whole thing, timed, without pausing, on the device and in the room you will use for the real one. This is where the largest part of the practice effect lives, and it is the day people skip because it is the least comfortable.

The point is not the score. It is to discover, cheaply, the things that would otherwise cost you on the day: that the data is behind tabs, that there is no back button, that the clock is per section rather than per item, that you cannot read a chart on that laptop screen.

Afterwards, spend ten minutes writing down what surprised you and which section was slowest. That list is your plan for days three and four.

Day 3: your weakest section

One section, focused work, roughly an hour. For most people it will be numerical or verbal and the split is fairly predictable by background.

If it is numerical

Drill the arithmetic rather than the questions. Building percentages from ten per cent, percentage change with the correct denominator, reverse percentages, ratios as a unit, and estimating against the options. The mental maths shortcuts set out the six worth automating.

If it is verbal

Practise answering strictly from the passage. Almost every mark lost on a True, False or Cannot Say item is lost to outside knowledge or to a plausible inference the text does not actually support. The discipline is mechanical: find the sentence that decides it, and if there is no such sentence, the answer is Cannot Say.

If it is abstract

Learn the standard rule families and apply a fixed inspection order rather than staring. The abstract reasoning pattern guide covers both.

Day 4: your second weakest, or the unusual format

Same shape as day three. If your assessment includes something structurally unfamiliar, spend today on that instead: a checking and accuracy section, a game-based battery, a situational judgement test in a response format you have not met. Unusual formats have the steepest first-exposure cost, so this is where an hour goes furthest.

For a situational judgement section, this is also the day to read the employer's published values or competency framework. SJT keys are built from those documents, which makes the employer's own material closer to the answer key than any advice article can be.

Day 5: logistics, which decide more than people think

An easy day, and a genuinely important one.

Pick the machine and the room. Laptop or desktop, never a phone unless the test explicitly supports one. Several tests, including the Thomas Aptitude battery, will not run on mobile at all.
Check the input device. Some assessments are mouse-only and some measure precision or reaction time. If you normally use a trackpad, borrow a mouse.
Test the connection where you will actually sit. Not in the room with the router.
Book the time. An uninterrupted block, in the part of the day you are sharpest, told to whoever else lives there.
Assemble the kit. Pen, paper, calculator if permitted, water. Several vendors name all three in their own guidance.
Request any adjustment now if you have not. It cannot be applied once you have started, and the adjustments guide covers the wording.

Day 6: one more full run, then stop

A second complete timed run, at roughly the time of day you intend to sit the real one. Compare it with day two: what improved is usually pacing and format familiarity rather than ability, which is exactly what should have improved.

Then stop. Not as a motivational flourish: a third and fourth run this close to the day adds very little and reliably costs you sleep and freshness, both of which affect a speeded test more than any amount of extra practice would help it.

Day 7: sit it

Warm up for two minutes with a handful of easy items, purely to get into the mode.

Set up the desk before you open the link: pen, paper, calculator, water, phone away, other tabs closed.

Do the unscored practice question at the start of each section properly. It is free exposure to the interface.

Work at a steady rate and commit. If you have read an item three times, answer it and move on.

Expect an adaptive test to get hard. That is what doing well feels like.

Do not

Do not cram new content in the hour before. It makes you tired and primes you to notice what you do not know.

Do not count the remaining items. It converts every question into arithmetic about failure.

Do not try to finish a test that was designed to be unfinishable. Several major formats put more items in front of you than anyone completes.

Do not sit it at 11pm on the deadline day. Ask for a short extension instead; recruiters grant them more often than candidates expect.

Do not reconstruct your score afterwards. Raw scores are discarded during scoring, so the arithmetic corresponds to nothing.

If you have one day rather than seven

Compress in this order and accept that you will not do all of it. Twenty minutes identifying the vendor and the guessing rule. One full timed run. Thirty minutes on your weakest section. Fifteen minutes on logistics. Sleep. That sequence keeps the two highest-return items and drops the rest, which is the right trade.

For the wider question of how much any of this moves the number, the honest version is in does practising psychometric tests actually work.