Can you cheat the PI Cognitive Assessment?

No. It gives you 50 questions in 12 minutes, which is roughly 14 seconds each, and questions rotate between forms. Any lookup costs more time than the question is worth, so help lowers your score rather than raising it.

Can you fake the PI Behavioral Assessment?

Not coherently. It asks you to describe yourself twice, once for how others expect you to behave and once for how you really are. The relationship between those two passes is part of what is read, and an invented profile does not produce a believable one.

Is the PI Behavioral Assessment timed?

It is not strictly timed, but it is designed to be completed quickly from instinct. Long deliberation tends to produce an inconsistent profile, because you end up optimising each adjective instead of describing yourself.

What is a good PI Cognitive score?

It depends on the role, because employers set a target range rather than a universal pass mark. Aiming far above the range is not an advantage: PI targets are ranges, and being wildly outside one is not read as a better fit.

How do I prepare for the PI assessments?

For the cognitive test, do full 12-minute runs and practise abandoning questions quickly, since almost nobody finishes. For the behavioural one, answer both passes quickly and honestly rather than trying to construct an ideal employee.

Predictive Index (PI)

Can You Cheat the Predictive Index Assessment?

The Predictive Index runs two tests, and each one has a different reason a shortcut fails at it.

Short answer: no.

The cognitive half is too fast to look anything up. The behavioural half asks you to describe yourself twice, and compares the two answers.

50 / 12 min

PI Cognitive

About 14 seconds a question

2 passes

PI Behavioral

You describe yourself twice

Untimed

The behavioural half

But answered in minutes

Two assessments, two separate reasons a shortcut fails

The Predictive Index is really two products, and candidates searching for a way around it usually have only one of them in mind. The PI Cognitive Assessment is a hard, speeded reasoning test. The PI Behavioral Assessment is a short self-description with no correct answers at all. They defeat a shortcut for completely different reasons.

PI Cognitive

Fifty questions, twelve minutes

About 14 seconds per question, with difficulty mixed rather than rising.

Almost nobody finishes, so throughput is the real constraint.

Questions rotate between forms, so a leaked list rarely matches your paper.

A lookup costs the time budget for two questions in order to answer one.

PI Behavioral

Two passes over the same list

No correct answers, and no scale where higher is simply better.

You describe yourself twice, from two different angles.

Profiles are matched to a role pattern rather than ranked.

A constructed answer set produces two passes that do not fit together.

The behavioural half asks the same thing twice

This is the part worth understanding, because it is unusual. The Behavioral Assessment presents a long list of descriptive words and asks you to work through it twice. The first pass is about how you think others expect you to behave. The second is about how you see yourself when nobody is setting expectations.

Answered honestly, the two passes have a natural relationship. Most people show some gap between the version of themselves they present at work and the version they are underneath, and the size and direction of that gap is meaningful in itself. Answered strategically, the relationship falls apart, because a candidate constructing an ideal employee constructs essentially the same person twice and produces a profile no real person generates.

There is no direction to fake in

PI profiles are matched against a target pattern for the role, not ranked on a scale. High dominance suits some jobs and works against you in others. The same is true of every factor. A candidate selecting the most employable-sounding word every time has not maximised anything, they have picked a target pattern at random and hoped it was the right one.

The cognitive half is a pacing test wearing a reasoning test costume

Fifty questions in twelve minutes is brutal, and the difficulty is mixed rather than rising, which means an easy question can sit directly after one that would take you two minutes. The skill being measured is not really reasoning in isolation. It is reasoning plus the judgement to walk away from a question that is not coming.

Do a full twelve-minute run before you do anything else

You need to feel the pace once. Almost everyone is shocked by it, and the shock is better absorbed in practice than in the real sitting.

Set a personal abandon limit

Roughly 20 seconds. If a question is not resolving by then, answer it and move on. Sunk cost is the largest single loss on this test.

Work out which of the three types slows you down

Verbal, numerical and abstract questions are interleaved. Most candidates have one that costs them disproportionately, and that is where practice pays.

Never leave a blank at the end

If the timer is about to expire, answer everything remaining. A guess is worth more than a blank, and blanks are the easiest marks to give away.

Both halves reward the same underlying thing: answering as yourself, quickly, without trying to reverse-engineer what someone else wanted. On the cognitive test that is called pacing. On the behavioural one it is called honesty. They happen to be the same advice.

Can You Cheat the Predictive Index Assessment?

Two assessments, two separate reasons a shortcut fails

The behavioural half asks the same thing twice

The cognitive half is a pacing test wearing a reasoning test costume

Frequently asked questions

Practise the Predictive Index (PI) assessment instead

What to do with the time instead

Predictive Index (PI) practice tests

Can you cheat Criteria (CCAT)?

Can you cheat Wonderlic?

Can you cheat Arctic Shores?

Every assessment answered