AssessFirst Practice: BRAIN, SWIPE and DRIVE

AssessFirst reports every result on a scale from 1 to 10, compared with a reference population of several hundred thousand profiles. The scale has the same shape as a sten: 5 and 6 cover the middle 40% of people, 4 and 7 the next 15% on each side, and 1 and 10 the most extreme 2% at each end.

On SWIPE and DRIVE neither end is better. A 2 on a facet describes a person who does that thing much less than most people, not a weakness, and the profile is compared with the role rather than marked. On BRAIN higher is better, and an employer that uses it picks one of these levels for the role:

SHAPE. AssessFirst’s previous personality questionnaire, a text questionnaire of forced-choice statements. SWIPE replaced it in May 2023, and AssessFirst’s own case studies written before then still say “Brain, Shape and Drive”. If an employer’s page names SHAPE, practise SWIPE.

The four-part BRAIN. Until 2020 BRAIN was a twenty-minute test with separate verbal, analogical, abstract and numerical reasoning, and it ran only on desktop browsers. AssessFirst replaced it with the adaptive figure-sequence test, which has no words or numbers at all. Most preparation sites, including some updated in 2026, still describe the old one.

VOICE. An AI spoken interview, launched in 2025, that asks job-related questions and can score a language against the CEFR levels. It is an interview marked by a model, not a test with a published format, so we describe it rather than imitate it.

SCAN. An AI screening conversation through your microphone at the start of some processes, after which you move on to whichever of SWIPE, DRIVE, BRAIN and VOICE the recruiter asked for.

MOVE and MOVE+. Questionnaires for people on French public employment training schemes, by trainer invitation only. Not part of hiring.

Predictive models and Talent Mapper. Employer-side tools that compare your profile with a role and give a compatibility percentage. They are not something you sit, and they read the same three questionnaires.

Where the figures come from. Item counts, BRAIN’s adaptive rules, its three-minute limit and Pass button, the 1 to 10 scale and the employer levels all come from AssessFirst’s own help centre and interpretation guides.

BRAIN is generated. AssessFirst publishes the rules of its adaptive route but not its items. Ours are generated for every sitting from rules of our own at ten levels of difficulty, and the answer is computed from the rule. What the real test does when the three minutes run out, and whether it treats Pass as a wrong answer, are not published; ours treats both as incorrect and tells you how many you had.

SWIPE and DRIVE items are ours. AssessFirst does not publish its pairs. Our SWIPE uses illustrated panels rather than photographs, and which swipe direction picks which caption on the real test is not documented; ours follows the arrows on the captions and also accepts a tap. DRIVE’s on-screen question is not published either, so our wording is our own. AssessFirst also says it adds a humility trait to SWIPE, but its facet guide lists no such scale, so we score the 20 facets the guide documents.

No practice phase. The real BRAIN opens with four tutorial sequences you can repeat and a Reveal answer button. Ours goes straight to the first scored sequence and explains the controls in the instructions instead.

Not affiliated with AssessFirst. CogniPrep is independent, and nothing you do here touches your AssessFirst profile.