Can You Cheat a Pearson TalentLens Test?
Raven’s, the Bennett test and DAT Next Generation all draw your questions from a bank as you sit them, so the paper someone else saw is not the paper you get.
Every candidate gets different questions, the adaptive tests choose each one from your last answer, and Pearson advises employers to confirm an unsupervised result with a supervised re-test.
There is no paper to leak
The shortcut most people have in mind is a copy of the questions. On a TalentLens test that copy cannot exist. All four tests here draw their questions from a bank at the moment you sit them. Pearson built them that way on purpose: its guide to Raven’s Adaptive says that because items come from a large bank, there is little benefit to test-takers sharing them, as each one will receive a different set. Its guide to the DAT Next Generation says the older fixed forms had become over-exposed, and that the bank is the fix.
The Bennett test and Raven’s APM-III work the same way without being adaptive. The Bennett test gives each candidate 55 questions with the same balance of topics and difficulty, and no two applicants receive the same set. APM-III gives each candidate 23 matrices of matched difficulty. Old paper forms of both tests have been around for decades, and whatever circulates from those is not what the online tests show.
On the adaptive tests, each answer chooses the next question
Raven’s Adaptive and the five DAT Next Generation subtests go a step further. The first question is of average difficulty. After that a right answer brings a harder question and a wrong answer an easier one, for 15 questions. Your route through the bank is decided by your own answers, so two candidates sitting side by side part company after the first question.
That also changes what help would do. The score is not the number you got right. It is an estimate of ability worked out from how hard each question was and whether you solved it. Answers borrowed for a few questions raise the difficulty of everything that follows, and the questions that follow are then yours to answer.
The result can be checked
These tests are usually sat at home, early in a hiring process, and Pearson is direct with employers about what that means. Its APM-III guide says results from an unsupervised sitting should be confirmed, either by a supervised sitting for all candidates in the last stages of the process or by another source such as a structured interview or an assessment centre exercise that measures the same ability. Its DAT Next Generation guide strongly recommends testing a screened candidate again at a later stage, and leaves the decision to the employer.
So whether you are re-tested depends on the employer, and you will not know in advance. Some employers do not screen with these tests at all and use them only on a shortlist: Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse, for one, tells TalentLens it uses them at the end of the process as decision tools for short-listed candidates. A home score that drops sharply under supervision is very hard to explain.
The Bennett test leaves no room to look things up
The Bennett test is the timed one: 55 questions in 25 minutes, about 27 seconds each. Each question is a drawing and a single line of text, and the answer is A, B, or C for equal. There is nothing to type into a search box and no time to do it. The candidates who score well are not calculating either. They recognise the principle in the drawing, which is exactly what the test is trying to find out.
What moves the result
Every one of these tests responds to practice at its own format, and none of it needs a shortcut. Our TalentLens practice tests follow the published lengths and clocks with our own questions.
For the detail of each test, see our guides to the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test and the DAT Next Generation Abstract Reasoning test.