Can You Cheat the Bundeswehr CAT-Test?
The CAT is only ever sat on a Bundeswehr test station in a supervised room, and it adapts to every answer you give.
The CAT runs only on locked, supervised Bundeswehr stations and adapts to every answer, so there is no fixed paper to copy or to leak.
There is no unsupervised sitting to shortcut
Many employer tests have an online stage you sit alone at home. The Bundeswehr CAT does not. Whether you are at the new Musterung or applying for a career as a Soldat auf Zeit, the test is sat at a Karrierecenter on one of the Bundeswehr’s own test stations: a desktop, a mouse, a blank sheet of paper, and a screen you are told not to touch.
The stations are controlled from a desk at the front of the room. The platform’s own description has the supervisor able to control and monitor every candidate station in the test room, and the Bundeswehr’s video shows that desk staffed by the Psychologischer Dienst. The software runs in a locked kiosk mode that, in the vendor’s words, prevents other programs from running. There is no browser tab to switch to and no window to hide.
An adaptive test has no paper to leak
A Bundeswehr psychologist puts it simply in the official video: answer wrongly and the test tends to get a little easier, answer correctly and it tends to get a little harder. Every candidate therefore finds it very demanding. That design is also a defence. Your next item depends on your last answer, and it comes from a pool the platform vendor described in 2015 as about 15,000 media files across its tests, so a list of someone else’s questions describes a path through the test you will probably never walk.
The platform is also being given a function to spot irregular results automatically, for example an item that is suddenly answered correctly much more often than the same group of candidates managed over a longer period. A leaked item is the thing it is built to notice.
What the result is used for
The CAT does not hand out a pass or a fail. The Bundeswehr describes the whole assessment, the CAT together with the interview and your other results, as the basis for deciding which careers and assignments suit you. Its head of selection in Berlin gives an example: a candidate who has a bad day in maths on the test but whose school reports show steady grades in the subject is not held back by the computer result. A weak area can be compensated, and an inflated one has nothing behind it.
That is why practice is worth more than any shortcut. Our Bundeswehr CAT-Test practice runs matrices, arithmetic, verbal analogies, route turns, technical understanding and the arrow reaction test, each against its own clock, with the difficulty moving up and down as you answer. If you are also applying to the British forces, their equivalent is the Army Cognitive Test.