Can You Cheat a Kenexa or Prove It Test?

The adaptive test has no paper to leak

Most cheating attempts assume a fixed artefact: a set of questions that exists before you sit down, which someone else has already seen. The Kenexa Computer Adaptive Test does not have one. Your first question is chosen at a middle difficulty, and every question after it is picked from how you answered the one before. Get it right and the next one is harder; get it wrong and the next one is easier.

Two consequences follow, and neither is negotiable. The first is that two candidates sitting the same test genuinely see different questions, so a shared question list describes somebody else's test rather than yours. The second is that you cannot go back. By the time you would want to revise an answer, the test has already used it to choose what to show you next.

The numerical test hands out a different sample every time

The fixed-form Kenexa numerical test is not adaptive, but it is drawn from a bank reported at 174 items, with every candidate receiving a different and comparable version. Twenty of those 174 turn up in your sitting. Memorising a leaked subset is a bet on a small overlap, under time pressure, against a test where a calculator is allowed anyway and the actual constraint is reading the table fast enough.

The verbal test is the honest exception

It would be easy to claim every Kenexa test is unleakable, and it is not true. The verbal reasoning test uses parallel forms: a set of fixed comparable papers rather than a per-candidate draw. Items genuinely do recur across candidates there.

It still does not help, for a different reason. Your raw number correct is converted to a percentile against a norm group, and employers cut on that percentile, commonly somewhere between the 50th and the 70th. Everyone in the norm group had the same material available to them. An advantage everybody can obtain is not an advantage: it moves the whole distribution and leaves the ranking where it was. The only thing that changes your position in a ranking is being better at the thing being ranked.

The skills tests, and the pass mark nobody publishes

Basic Office Skills and its relatives are ordinary multiple-choice papers, and in principle the items could leak. The problem is that leaked answers do not tell you what you need to know, because IBM deliberately does not publish a cut score. Its own validation guidance says companies should set their own proficiency levels to reflect the needs of the position, and adds the detail that actually matters to a candidate:

That last row is the reason a shortcut is visible here even when it works. The report shows time per item and a topic breakdown, so a run that is uniformly fast and uniformly perfect looks different from a run by someone who is simply good at spelling and slower on the arithmetic. IBM does not cap the time on these tests, but it does record it.

What actually moves the result

Three habits, one per family, and all three are things practice genuinely builds.

• On the adaptive test, commit and move. There is no negative marking, so a considered guess is strictly better than letting a question time out, and a timeout costs you twice: the mark, and the easier question you get handed next. Practise deciding.
• On the fixed-form reasoning tests, budget the pool. Twenty minutes covers all the questions rather than each one getting its own clock, so time spent on a hard item is taken from the end of the paper. Knowing when to abandon an item is the skill.
• On the skills test, slow down. It is untimed. Speed buys you nothing and accuracy costs you everything, which is the exact opposite of the advice for every other test in this provider.

You can practise all seven Kenexa formats at our Kenexa hub, including the adaptive test, with the real item counts and clocks. If your invitation named TalentCentral rather than Kenexa, the SHL hub is also worth reading: SHL now delivers this content.