Can You Cheat the Matrigma Test?

The publisher tells employers to make you sit it again

Most pages in this series argue that a shortcut cannot be executed. Assessio is the one where the interesting problem is what happens when it works.

Assessio recommends supervised administration outright, and its Classic Matrigma technical manual says what to do when that did not happen: where the test was taken unsupervised, it is recommended that the respondent is re-tested under supervised conditions, or that the score is supplemented with a second measure of general mental ability. That is not a warning in a candidate FAQ. It is instruction to the person who bought the test.

On the Dutch side the same idea has been turned into a product with a name. Assessio Bloom, the company that was eelloo until January 2024, sells a home test with a checktest: a supervised follow-up of roughly fifteen minutes whose only purpose is to confirm that the unsupervised result was really yours. Its own product page describes the home test version with checktest as the configuration for remote application.

There is no fixed paper to leak

The adaptive version does not have a paper that exists before you sit down. Items start on the low side of the difficulty range, and every item after that is picked from how you answered the one before: correct and the next is harder, wrong and it drops to a considerably lower level. Assessio describes the process as running for about ten minutes of search followed by roughly two minutes of items at your located level, to confirm it.

Three consequences follow. Two candidates sitting at the same moment genuinely see different items, so a shared list describes somebody else's test. You cannot go back, because by the time you would want to revise an answer the test has already used it to choose what to show you. And your result reflects the difficulty you reached rather than your raw count, so a candidate answering sixty per cent correctly at the hardest band outscores one answering ninety per cent correctly at the easiest.

The items are pictures with no searchable content

Assessio states the anti-cheating properties of the item pool in its own technical manual, and they are unusually specific for a vendor document:

There is a harder constraint sitting on top of all four: the 60-second clock on every single item. Time spent on a lookup is not taken from the test, it is taken from the item you were trying to look up, and when it expires the test moves on without you. On the Dutch Q1000 battery the same trap is tighter still, because Diagrammen allows twenty-five seconds a question and unused seconds do not carry over.

Five of the classic version's items do not count

The Classic form presents thirty-five items and scores thirty. Assessio's 2017 manual records respondents completing a form plus five additional items, of which only the thirty were used to interpret results, with the extra five held back under evaluation.

You are not told which five. That makes a partial answer key worth materially less than its length suggests, but the honest reason to mention it is the other one: if an item looks unlike everything around it, it may simply not count, and it is never worth panicking over. There are also five parallel forms, A to E, so a key from one candidate may describe a form you were not given.

MAP and Match-V, where trying to win is the mistake

MAP is a Five Factor questionnaire reported across five factors and twenty-five facets. Assessio says in its own words that there is no such thing as the right personality and that there is no advantage in being dishonest, and unusually, the product architecture backs that up rather than merely asserting it.

Assessio derives a separate report from a MAP administration called MAP-X, built on what it calls the Extremes Model: dispositions at the extremes of the Five Factor Model are held to be likely to be dysfunctional and maladaptive, while personalities in the middle are more likely to be adaptive. It names ten poles in five pairs: Withdrawn and Attention Seeking, Insensitive and Overcaring, Impulsive and Rigid, Emotional and Unresponsive, Conformist and Eccentric.

Match-V has the same shape for a different reason. It measures values, and your result is compared against an employer's culture profile rather than against a standard. There is no set of values that scores well in general, and the four domains it uses oppose each other in pairs, so a profile that endorses everything is harder to read rather than more attractive. Both instruments are untimed, which means the only self-inflicted problem available is rushing them.

What actually moves the result

Three habits. The third one is the opposite of what almost every other test rewards.

• Always answer before the clock expires. Nothing in the Assessio range deducts marks for a wrong answer, and on the Q1000 battery a blank is explicitly counted as wrong. An unanswered matrix item is a certain zero; a guess among six options is not. Practise committing rather than agonising.
• Learn the rule families, not the items. A matrix item is a small number of rules running across rows and down columns: a value distributed three ways, a quantity progressing, a figure rotating, two cells combining into a third. Reading one attribute at a time and eliminating options as you go is the skill, and it transfers to every item you will ever be shown. It is also the only thing that transfers.
• Slow down. Assessio states that the speed of answering does not impact the final score, so a spare thirty seconds on an item is worth nothing banked and a great deal spent. If you are finishing items in twenty seconds you are donating accuracy for a reward that does not exist.

You can practise all five Assessio formats at our Assessio hub, including both Matrigma variants with their real clocks and the Dutch Q1000 battery with its per-question budgets. If your invitation said eelloo, Meurs HRM or Q1000, that is the same publisher and the same page.