Sogeti Assessment Practice

Why Sogeti is unusual: there is an actual pass mark

Sogeti is the technology services arm of Capgemini, hiring testers, cyber security specialists and developers. Ixly publishes a case study on its selection process, and it contains something most assessment case studies do not: a calibrated cut-off score.

Sogeti selects candidates on learning agility using Ixly intelligence tests, and Ixly built custom reports for two role categories, engineering and consultancy, each with its own threshold. The case describes those thresholds being tuned over about a year to balance rejecting unsuitable candidates against rejecting good ones.

That matters for how you prepare. On most assessments your score is a ranking and a recruiter decides what to do with it. Here there is a line, it is different depending on which kind of role you applied for, and clearing it is the thing.

Sogeti hires for learning agility rather than for what you already know, which is worth reading as encouragement rather than as a warning: the test is not a knowledge exam and cramming a technology stack will not move it.

What an Ixly capacity test involves

Ixly administers everything through the Test-Toolkit. An invitation email carries a unique link; an overview screen lists the tests assigned to you; a short questionnaire before the first one collects age, gender and education level, and that last answer selects your norm group.

• Forty-five seconds per item, with no overall clock and no banking time between items.
• An unanswered item is scored as wrong, so a guess is never worse than silence. Ixly states this on the instruction screen itself.
• No going back. Answers are saved as given, and the item clock keeps running if you leave the test, so you resume on the next item rather than the one you left.
• It adapts. The difficulty chases you and the test stops once it has measured you, so roughly half right is a normal result whatever your ability.
• Scratch paper yes, calculator no.

Because Sogeti hires into technical and process-heavy roles, Stroomdiagrammen is worth knowing about specifically. Ixly positions that test for “roles designing or analysing complex processes: logistics, technical roles, software development, HBO level and above”, which is the Sogeti population precisely. It gives you a legend of operations and a chain of them applied to a starting figure, and asks what comes out.

Reading the result

Ixly reports a sten from 1 to 10, a T-score, a percentile and an IQ score, each with an 80% confidence interval. The sten has a mean of 5.5, so a 5 is average and not a fail. Ixly's manual warns about this directly, because a 5 on a Dutch school report means something entirely different.

The norm group is your education level: VMBO, MBO, HBO or WO. Ixly's worked example takes one raw score and reports it as the 92nd percentile against one group and the 25th against another. Since Sogeti recruits mainly at HBO and WO level, expect to be measured against a demanding group.

Ixly also advises employers to base decisions mainly on the overall g-score rather than on a single subtest, because the figural subtest alone falls short of the usual reliability threshold. So one weak block matters less than a weak total.

How to prepare for a threshold rather than a ranking

Do not donate items to the clock

With a cut-off in play, the cheapest marks available are the ones you lose by letting items expire, because Ixly scores those as wrong. Practise committing an answer at around 35 seconds whether or not you feel finished.

Work on the hard band, not the easy one

On an adaptive test your score comes from how hard the items got before you started missing. Grinding easy items repeatedly moves nothing. Practise at the difficulty where you start getting things wrong.

Learn the flowchart format before test day

Stroomdiagrammen is the item type most candidates have never seen, and the difficulty is front-loaded: you have to learn a legend of operations before you can trace anything. The legend also always contains operations the chain does not use, and applying everything in it is the most common way to get one wrong.

Sit it uninterrupted

Because the clock keeps running while you are away from the screen, an interruption is a question you have given up.

Practise the exact tests

Our Ixly practice hub has all three ACT subtests, Cognitive Ability Pro, Stroomdiagrammen and the WPV. Cijferreeksen is free.