TestGroup Practice: The Bridge Capaciteitentest and Persoonlijkheidstest

Every Bridge score, on the ability tests and the questionnaires alike, is a sten from 1 to 10against a norm group of 500 people at your education level. The scale has a midpoint of 5.5, so 5 and 6 are the middle of the distribution rather than a bare pass. TestGroup says it outright in the Bridge Career report: a 5 means about half the norm group scored lower and half higher, and "een score van 5 is dus geen onvoldoende, het is de score die de meeste mensen op een dimensie hebben".

We show you a percentile too, because that is the language most preparation material speaks, but our TestGroup feedback leads with the sten and the band label your real report will carry, and says explicitly when a mid score is the normal one. That is a deliberate difference from how we describe every other provider here, and it exists because the two vocabularies describe the same performance very differently.

An ability report carries four scores, not one. Totaalscore is how many you got right. Efficiëntie is the same thing corrected for guessing. Accuraatheid is right as a share of attempted. And Snelheid, despite the name, means how many questions you reached rather than how fast you answered them. The short Bridge Ability Online report carries seven: those four plus a sten for each domain.

That is why guessing hurts even without negative marking. Nothing is deducted from your Totaalscore for a wrong answer, which usually means guess at everything. Here it does not, because Efficiëntie sits beside it and is explicitly corrected for guessing. A blank costs you nothing there; a wrong answer does. TestGroup's own candidate advice is "wij raden je aan om weinig te gokken". You can see the diagnostic working in its published sample reports: one shows Snelheid 8 with Accuraatheid 1, which is the arithmetic signature of somebody who answered nearly everything at random.

There is no pass mark. No Bridge report we have seen carries one, and there is no overall percentile either. Employers set their own thresholds on top of the stens.

17 minutes or 18? TestGroup's candidate manuals say 25 questions in 17 minutes per subtest. Two of its product pages say "3 maal 18 minuten". The most likely reading is 17 minutes of test time inside an 18-minute block that includes the instruction screen, since the manuals say the clock does not start until the first real question. We build to 17 because the manual is the most specific and most candidate-facing source, and we state both figures rather than quietly picking one.

The ability tests are not adaptive. One third-party comparison article says TestGroup offers an adaptive version that adjusts the level automatically. We could not find that claim on any first-party capaciteitentest page, and we looked specifically. First-party adaptivity claims exist only for The Bridge Personality, where what is meant is the tie-break mechanism, and for The Bridge Career, where the questions narrow to your interests. So we build the ability tests as fixed forms at a level chosen up front, which is what the level system (mbo, hbo, wo) implies anyway.

The calculator question.The English numerical manual tells candidates to have a calculator to hand. The Dutch manual's equivalent list omits that line and the Dutch preparation advice says to learn to do difficult sums without one. We treat a calculator as allowed and keep the arithmetic light enough that it is not decisive either way.

The Bridge Ability Online item count is our choice. TestGroup publishes the 18-minute clock and the three-domain structure but not how many questions there are. We use 27, nine per domain, picked to keep the seconds per question near the Suite's 41. That is a design decision, not a sourced fact.

The Efficiëntie formula is ours. TestGroup says the score is corrected for guessing but does not publish the correction. We use the conventional one, subtracting wrong answers divided by the number of options minus one, which reproduces the pattern in both of TestGroup's published sample reports. The behaviour it rewards is the behaviour the vendor recommends, but the arithmetic is not theirs.

We shortened the two questionnaires. The real Bridge Personality is 240 statements in 40 screens and The Bridge Career is 312 questions. Ours run 18 screens of six each, which keeps the screen shape, the nine point scale and the tie-break rule exactly and costs you 20 minutes rather than 40. Everything that makes those instruments distinctive is in the mechanic, not in the length.

Three things on the real report we do not reproduce. The Bridge Personality report converts the profile into eight named competencies, and TestGroup does not publish which dimensions combine into each, so any mapping we invented would be ours wearing their labels. The Bridge Career report ranks Dutch occupations and study programmes from an unpublished library, and the same applies. And the personality report places you on a colour wheel across 72 positions, where we report the four colour scores without the wheel.

We do not know whether the real platform works on a phone. TestGroup describes the Bridge Assessment Platform only as a modern web application, and it does require pop-ups to be enabled, which points at a desktop. Our practice tests work properly at phone width because revising on a train is a real thing people do, but sit the real one on a laptop and enable pop-ups first, because a blocked pop-up will make the test look broken.

One name to recognise: TestGroup Consulting. Every candidate manual and sample report is footed "TestGroup Consulting" with a testgroup.eu address, while the current sites are testgroup.com, testgroup.nl and testgroup.be, and testgroup.eu now redirects to testgroup.nl. You log in at bridge-assessment.com. TestGroup, TestGroup Consulting, testgroup.eu and Bridge Assessment are all the same organisation.