How the UCAT works
Criteria designed the UCAT as a sister test to its CCAT. It measures the same broad cognitive aptitude but leaves out verbal questions, which is what lets Criteria offer it in 21 languages against the CCAT’s two. Criteria aims it at mid- to high-level positions, particularly for international candidates, and at roles that involve a lot of training, such as apprentice, intern and graduate jobs.
The 40 questions cover four areas, and Criteria publishes an example of each. Logic and analysis: if Jim is older than Kate, Kate is older than Brian and Sophie is older than Jim, what must be true? Numerical reasoning: a city of 1,300 people grows by 30%, so what is its new population (1,690)? Attention to detail: how many of four pairs of pictures are exactly the same? Spatial reasoning: which of five shapes does not belong?
Like the CCAT, it draws on a large item bank so that no two candidates get exactly the same questions, and it runs on any device: phone, tablet, laptop or desktop.
Criteria UCAT is not the medical school UCAT
Search for "UCAT" and most results are about the University Clinical Aptitude Test, an admissions test that a consortium of UK and partner universities uses to select applicants to medical and dental degrees. It is taken in Pearson test centers and has nothing to do with Criteria.
If an employer invited you and the invitation mentions Criteria, you are taking the Universal Cognitive Aptitude Test described on this page. Preparation material for the medical school test is written for a different test.
How it is scored
Your raw score is the number of questions you answer correctly out of 40. Employers see it with a percentile against Criteria’s norm group and a percentile for each of the four abilities. As with the CCAT, they compare your score with suggested ranges for the role, such as Accounting or IT Support, rather than one pass mark.
Criteria’s norm group is 10,223 adults, who averaged 22.18 out of 40 with a standard deviation of 7.58. It reports a reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of 0.90, a correlation of .80 with the CCAT among 252 people who took both, and more than 1 million administrations.
Criteria’s own case study on Teladoc Health describes the UCAT, used with the Employee Personality Profile, to select apprentices from coding bootcamps for its software engineering, DevOps and QA teams.
How our practice version works
Our UCAT practice is a 40-question, 20-minute paper with five options per question and no verbal items, matching Criteria’s published length and time. It covers only two of the four areas, math and logic and spatial reasoning, mixed together. It has no attention-to-detail questions, so it will not rehearse the picture-comparison items. Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer in our version; Criteria does not publish a guessing rule for the UCAT.