How the Civil Service Verbal Test works
Each screen shows a passage of a paragraph or two and one statement. You choose True, False or Cannot say and press Next. The answer must come from the passage only, not from what you know about the subject.
The test is adaptive: a right answer can make the next question harder and a wrong one easier, so the number of questions differs from person to person. It is untimed, and the time you take does not affect your score. You cannot skip a question or go back, and some questions are unscored trial items that you cannot tell apart from the rest.
Your score depends on how many questions you got right and how hard they were. It is reported as a percentile against a representative group of applicants. You can take it in English or Welsh, and you can close it and carry on where you left off.
How to answer True, False or Cannot say
Run the same checks on every statement:
- Read the statement, then find the sentence or sentences in the passage that it depends on.
- Choose True only when you can point to words that prove it, either directly or by putting two sentences together.
- Choose False only when the passage says the opposite. A statement the passage does not cover is Cannot say, not False.
- Check the small words: all, only, most, since, more than. A statement that turns "some" into "all", or a link into a cause, is rarely True.
- Ignore what you know about the topic from elsewhere, even when it is correct.
Worked example
Passage: "Since April, the Northfield passport office has opened on Saturday mornings. In the first three months, Saturday appointments made up 9% of all appointments at the office, and the average wait for a weekday appointment fell from 18 days to 13. Staff numbers have not changed, because the Saturday sessions are covered by overtime."
The real test gives one statement per passage. Here are three against the same passage, one for each answer.
"The office took on extra staff to run the Saturday sessions." False: the passage says staff numbers have not changed.
"Saturday opening caused the fall in weekday waiting times." Cannot say: both facts are in the passage, but it never says one caused the other.
"Weekday waits were shorter in the first three months of Saturday opening than before." True: the average fell from 18 days to 13 in those months.
Tips for the real Verbal Test
- Take your time on every question. The Civil Service says how long you take does not affect your score.
- Settle each answer before you press Next. There is no going back to change it later.
- Expect it to feel hard. An adaptive test raises the difficulty as you get answers right, so struggling is not a sign you are failing.
- Treat every question as scored. You cannot tell which ones are trial items.
- Use a laptop or desktop in a quiet place. It works on a phone, but the Civil Service says it works much better on a larger screen.
- A pass is banked for six months for other jobs in the same grade grouping, so one good sitting can cover several applications.
Practise the Civil Service Verbal Test on CogniPrep
Our Verbal Test is adaptive and untimed like the real one: one passage and one True, False or Cannot say statement per screen, with no going back and no question counter. It stops once it has measured your level, after 12 to 24 scored questions, and slips in two unscored trial items that it points out afterwards. Your result is a percentile against other CogniPrep users rather than Civil Service applicants, with feedback on whether you lose marks to Cannot say or to mixing up True and False. The passages and their difficulty ratings are ours.