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TestGroup (The Bridge)

Can You Cheat The Bridge Capaciteitentest or Persoonlijkheidstest?

TestGroup screens unsupervised and then verifies supervised, which means a borrowed score has to survive being produced again in a room.

Short answer: no.

Your Bridge Ability Online paper is drawn from an item bank, so answers from someone else’s sitting are answers to different questions. And TestGroup’s own report tells the employer to re-test important decisions on the supervised Bridge Ability Suite.

TestGroup sells the unsupervised test and the supervised one as separate products, and tells employers in the unsupervised report to use the supervised one when the decision matters. A borrowed score has to survive being produced again.

The defence here is a pipeline, not an item format

Most assessment publishers defeat a shortcut with something about the questions: a clock too fast to look anything up in, an adaptive pool, a forced-choice format with no flattering option. TestGroup does some of that, but its real answer is structural, and it is written into the products themselves.

The Bridge Ability Online is an eighteen-minute test sent to large groups, taken at home, with nobody watching. TestGroup says so in the report the employer receives: it is taken "in een ongecontroleerde omgeving". And in the same report it tells that employer what to do about it, recommending the Bridge Ability Suite "voor belangrijke selectiebeslissingen", which is taken in a controlled environment.

That is the whole argument. The unsupervised test is not the one that decides anything. It is the one that decides who sits the supervised one. A score you did not earn does not end the process, it books you an appointment.

Your paper does not exist until you start it

The second mechanism is the item bank. TestGroup's founder has stated it plainly: every version of The Bridge Ability Online is unique because of the built-in item bank, and the platform can verify results directly and determine whether the person who took the assessment was the candidate in question.

This matters more than it sounds, because of how the questions are arranged. Bridge Verbaal and Bridge Numeriek ask several questions about one document or one table. Bridge Abstract asks several questions against one set of operator keys. A leaked question without its stimulus is not an answerable question at all, and the stimulus is what varies.

Unsupervised
Bridge Ability Online, 18 minutes
Sent early, to large groups, taken at home. Numerical, verbal and abstract on one clock, scored per domain. TestGroup calls this an uncontrolled environment in its own report.
Supervised
Bridge Ability Suite, 3 x 17 minutes
Taken in a controlled environment. This is the one TestGroup recommends for important selection decisions, and the one a strong unsupervised score tends to lead to.
No marks at all
The Bridge Personality
A profile across 34 dimensions with no overall score and no pass mark. There is nothing to inflate, and three response-style scales measuring how hard you are trying to look good.
No better answer
The Bridge Career
An interest inventory. A high Conventional score is not better than a high Artistic one. Steering it produces a worse match, not a better score.

The trap that costs honest candidates marks

There is one piece of common knowledge about this test that is half true, and the half that is false is expensive.

It is true that nothing is deducted from your Totaalscore for a wrong answer. It is not true that guessing is therefore free. A Bridge ability report carries four scores, not one, and the second of them is Efficiëntie, which TestGroup defines as your result "gecorrigeerd voor gokken naar het goede antwoord". It is printed next to your total and the employer sees both.

A blank contributes nothing to that correction. A wrong answer does. So filling in the last eight questions at random in the final minute lifts your Totaalscore a little and pulls your Efficiëntie down visibly, and the gap between the two is exactly the pattern the report exists to make obvious. You can see it in TestGroup's own published samples: one shows Snelheid 8 with Accuraatheid 1, which is the arithmetic signature of somebody who answered nearly everything and knew almost none of it.

The vendor's advice on this is one sentence: wij raden je aan om weinig te gokken. Guess little.

The personality test re-asks anything you answer the same way

Second-guessing a personality questionnaire is not usually deliberate cheating. It is the ordinary instinct to work out what the employer wants and say that. The Bridge is built in a way that makes it backfire mechanically rather than morally.

Six statements appear at a time on a nine point scale. Any that you rate identically come straight back, and you are asked which applies to you most and which least. You cannot rate them both high to be safe: you have to separate them. That forced choice is much harder to steer than a rating scale, and the report then compares the two halves, flagging every dimension where they differ by more than three stens.

There are two further scales on top of that. Sociale wenselijkheid measures how far you leaned to the flattering answer, illustrated in the report with the line "Ik ken bijna niemand die zo betrouwbaar en hard werkt als ik". Instemmend antwoorden measures whether you simply agreed with everything. A profile with no low dimensions does not read as strong. It reads as steered.

Do
Skip early and come back. The manual says you can, and the overview screen shows what is still open. Triage is the actual skill this test measures.
Leave a question blank rather than guess blindly. It costs you nothing on Efficiëntie and a wrong answer does.
Take "Niet te beoordelen" and "Geen van alle" seriously. Both are genuinely correct on some questions and candidates talk themselves out of both.
Have a calculator to hand for Bridge Numeriek, which the English manual tells you to do, and enable pop-ups before you start, which the platform requires.
Answer the personality questionnaire from a work perspective rather than as an ideal version of yourself, and use the full nine points.
Prepare a real STAR example for the dimensions where you expect an extreme score, because a feedbackgesprek will ask for exactly that.
Do not
Do not fill in the remaining answers at random in the last minute. It is visible in the report as a gap between two of your four scores.
Do not treat a strong unsupervised score as the finish line. The short test is the screen; the long supervised one is the decision.
Do not hunt for answer sets. Your paper is drawn from an item bank and the questions are grouped around a stimulus you will not have seen.
Do not rate everything the same on the personality test to stay safe. It triggers more forced-choice screens, not fewer, and flattens your profile.
Do not read a sten of 5 as a fail and try to compensate. The scale runs 1 to 10 with a midpoint of 5.5, and TestGroup says in its own report that a 5 is the score most people get.

What actually moves a Bridge score

More than usual, and mostly for an unglamorous reason: a large share of the available gain here is strategic rather than intellectual, and almost nobody arrives knowing the strategy.

Twenty-five questions in seventeen minutes is about forty-one seconds each including reading the passage or the table, and TestGroup says outright that the tests are designed so that almost nobody finishes. A candidate who does not know that will grind through a hard question early and lose four cheap ones at the end. A candidate who does will park it, and can come back to it, because this is one of the few timed papers that lets you.

Then there is the abstract test, which is not the test most people prepare for. It is not a matrix and there is nothing to complete. Worked examples show what each operator key does, and the question asks which key turned one figure into another. It runs the rule backwards. Meeting that for the first time on a seventeen-minute clock costs several questions while you work out what you are even being asked, and that is a cost practice removes entirely.

Frequently asked questions

Can you find the answers to a capaciteitentest?

Not usefully. TestGroup states that every version of The Bridge Ability Online is unique because of the item bank behind it, so a set of answers from somebody else’s sitting is a set of answers to different questions. And the questions are grouped in sets around a passage, a table or an operator legend, so even a leaked question is useless without the stimulus it belongs to.

What happens if I score well on the short test at home?

Quite possibly a longer test in a room. The Bridge Ability Online is explicitly described as taken "in een ongecontroleerde omgeving" and its own report recommends the Bridge Ability Suite "voor belangrijke selectiebeslissingen", which is taken in a controlled environment. That is the standard screen-then-verify model, and it means an inflated first score creates a gap somebody has to explain.

Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so should I guess everything?

No, and this is the most common and most expensive mistake on this test. Your Totaalscore does not deduct for wrong answers, but the report also carries Efficiëntie, which TestGroup describes as your result corrected for guessing at the right answer, and that number goes to the employer beside your total. A blank costs you nothing on Efficiëntie; a wrong answer does. TestGroup’s own advice is to guess sparingly.

Can I fill in the persoonlijkheidstest the way I think they want?

You can try, and the instrument is built to notice. Statements you rate identically are immediately re-presented as a forced choice asking which applies to you most and which least. The rated half is easy to steer; the forced-choice half is not, and the report flags every dimension where the two disagree by more than three stens. It also carries a social desirability scale and an acquiescence scale.

Can somebody else sit the test for me?

TestGroup states that its platform can verify results directly and determine whether the candidate in question was the person who took the assessment. Beyond the technology, the personality result is normally delivered to you in a feedbackgesprek where someone walks through the dimensions asking whether you recognise yourself in each score, which is a difficult conversation to have about somebody else’s profile.

Does practising help, if cheating does not?

Substantially, and more than on most tests, because so much of the available gain here is strategic rather than intellectual. Knowing that skipping is free and reversible, that "Geen van alle" is genuinely correct sometimes, that a calculator is allowed, and that guessing costs you on a score you have never heard of changes a result on its own.

Practise the TestGroup (The Bridge) assessment instead

Realistic simulations with scored feedback, so you walk in having already done it once. Free to start.