Can You Cheat the NOA Test? Eight Short Clocks
NOA does not give you one long test to manage. It gives you eight short ones, each with a clock too tight to look anything up.
Thirty sums in five minutes, forty-five word pairs in nine: there is no time to consult anyone or anything. Admission sittings can be recorded by ProctorExam, and the old answer lists are for items NOA replaced in 2024.
Eight short tests, not one long one
Most reasoning tests give you a single block of time to manage. NOA’s MCT-M and MCT-H give you eight, one per subtest, and each one is short. NOA’s own staff published the MCT-M figures: 30 sums in 5 minutes, 45 word pairs in 9, 30 odd-one-out figures in 7. NOA’s candidate page puts it simply: the tests themselves run from 4 to 20 minutes, and most people do not finish.
A shortcut needs a spare minute to work in. At ten seconds a sum there is no spare minute, and the next subtest is a different item type with its own clock, so there is no slack to carry over either.
Admissions sittings can be recorded
A lot of NOA testing is not hiring at all. It is admission: the hbo 21+ route for applicants without the usual diploma, where Hogeschool Utrecht alone put about 600 applicants a year through six MCT-H subtests. For that use NOA partners with ProctorExam, which records the screen, the webcam and the microphone, can film the room through a phone, and has the recording reviewed afterwards by trained assessors.
The point of a recorded sitting is that it can be checked after the fact. A second person in the room, a second screen or a phone in your hand is on the recording whether or not anyone notices at the time.
The answer lists are for a test that has changed
The honest version of this argument has to start with a concession. The MCT-M and MCT-H are fixed forms: the same items for every candidate at a level, in the same order. That is why answer lists exist at all.
But when NOA moved its tests to the NOA Talent Portal in 2024 it replaced items that were not working well, renamed every subtest and restyled the reports. A list compiled from an older sitting describes a paper that no longer exists in that form. And a list is only as useful as your ability to find an item in it: at ten to eighteen seconds an item, looking anything up is slower than answering it.
The adaptive MCT-A removes the concession entirely. Its questions are chosen from your own earlier answers out of a large item bank, so two candidates do not see the same paper.
Your report does not show a score to inflate
NOA’s candidate report draws each result as a bar in three bands, Lager, Midden and Hoger, with the stanine number deliberately left off, and it compares you with people at the education level the school or employer chose. There is no pass mark in the test itself. A Midden result means, in NOA’s own words, that the level is achievable for you. Chasing a higher band by any route other than being better at the items buys you a place on a course or in a job pitched above where you would comfortably work.
What actually moves a NOA result
Familiarity with eight formats and a sense of pace on each. The components subtest wants two answers out of six and gives nothing for one; the mirror images subtest always has exactly two flipped figures; the word relations subtest mixes same-meaning and opposite pairs without telling you which. Each of those is a rule a first-time candidate spends seconds discovering, and on a five- to nine-minute clock those seconds are the difference between bands.
The rest is the ordinary work of reasoning practice: testing number rules against the whole row, putting word pairs into a sentence, and counting pieces before comparing shapes.