DJI Ixly Assessment Practice

What DJI uses, and where the evidence comes from

Dienst Justitiële Inrichtingen is the Dutch prison and custodial service, part of the Ministry of Justice and Security, and it recruits at scale across prison officer, juvenile justice, forensic care and support roles.

The assessment vendor is documented first-hand rather than inferred. Ixly publishes a case study describing a relationship running since 2018, in which DJI uses Ixly for the (pre-)selectie van kandidaten and runs around 4,000 assessment trajectories a year. The case also notes that Ixly built custom reports for DJI and folded one of DJI's own questionnaires into the platform, so parts of the battery are bespoke to DJI rather than off the shelf.

That last point is why this page describes the format rather than promising you a fixed list of tests. What is solid is the vendor and the stage: Ixly, early, as a sift.

What sitting an Ixly test is actually like

Ixly administers everything through the Test-Toolkit. You get an invitation email with a unique link, land on an overview screen listing every test assigned to you, and where there are several you choose the order. Before the first one you answer a short questionnaire covering age, gender and education level, and that last answer matters more than it looks: it selects the group you will be compared against.

• Forty-five seconds per item, on every item. There is no overall clock for you to manage and no way to bank time from an easy question for a hard one.
• An unanswered item is scored as WRONG. Not skipped, not neutral. Ixly states this on its own instruction screen. So a guess is never worse than silence, which is the opposite of the right strategy on a negatively marked test.
• You cannot go back.Your answer is saved the moment you give it. Closing the test does not pause the item's clock either: you return to the next item, not the one you left.
• It adapts. Answer correctly and the next item is harder; answer wrongly and it eases off. The test stops once it has measured you, so a shorter run is not a worse one, and roughly half right is a normal outcome whatever your ability.
• One worked example and three untimed practice items precede each test, and the practice items tell you whether you were right. They are the only unmeasured part of the sitting.
• Scratch paper yes, calculator no.Ixly's manual explicitly permits a kladblok and never mentions a calculator.

Reading a result you have probably been sent before

An Ixly report gives four numbers: a sten from 1 to 10, a T-score, a percentile and an IQ score, each with an 80% confidence interval.

A sten of 5 is an average score, not a fail.The scale has a mean of 5.5, so 5 and 6 are the middle bands. Ixly's own manual warns candidates about this specifically, because a 5 on a Dutch school report is an onvoldoende and people read the two the same way. They are not the same thing.

The comparison group is your own education level: VMBO, MBO, HBO or WO. Ixly's worked example takes a single raw score and reports it as the 92nd percentile against one group and the 25th against another. So a result is only meaningful alongside the group it was measured against, and a role advertised at a higher level is a harder comparison for exactly the same performance.

How to prepare for a sift you get one attempt at

Fix the pacing before you fix anything else

The most expensive mistake on an Ixly test is letting items expire, because the vendor has defined an expired item as a wrong one. Practise committing an answer at around 35 seconds whether or not you feel finished. That one habit removes the only avoidable zero on the paper.

Work out which of two problems you have

Answers arriving late means pacing. Answers arriving on time and being wrong means reasoning, and needs the opposite practice: slow down deliberately on the easier items and get the rule right, because on an adaptive test a correct answer moves you to a harder item and it is the difficulty you reach that carries the score.

Do not treat the personality questionnaire as another hurdle

If DJI sends you the WPV, it has no right answers and Ixly says so on the report itself. It measures 25 scales at once, and those scales pull in different directions, so answering as the person you imagine a prison service wants produces a contradictory profile rather than a flattering one. Answer it as you are.

Sit it somewhere you will not be interrupted

Because the item clock keeps running when you step away, an interruption is not a pause. It is a question you have given up.

Practise the exact tests

Our Ixly practice hub has all three ACT subtests at their real 45 seconds an item, Cognitive Ability Pro, Stroomdiagrammen and the WPV. Cijferreeksen is free.