How the Occupational Reasoning Assessment works
OPM describes it as multiple-choice questions where you “draw logical conclusions based on the information provided, analyze scenarios, and evaluate arguments”. Everything you need is in the question, and no knowledge of federal rules is needed.
The commonest item gives you one or two statements, then a conclusion, and asks whether the conclusion is true, false, or whether there is insufficient information to decide. Three options sit below as full-width rows: True, False and Insufficient Information.
Each question has its own five-minute clock, drawn as a bar across the top of the screen that drains as time passes. You select an option and then press the button to record it. Once recorded you cannot go back, and an item left blank when time runs out scores zero.
In OPM’s Competency Lookup Tool the Reasoning assessment is in almost every standard battery from GS-9 upwards, and in roughly one in ten from GS-4 to GS-8.
How to answer True, False or Insufficient Information
Treat each statement as a fact for the question, however odd it sounds, and test the conclusion against it:
- Write the statements as short rules on scratch paper, such as “all A are B”.
- Mark True only if the conclusion must follow from the statements alone.
- Mark False only if the statements make the conclusion impossible.
- Mark Insufficient Information if the conclusion could be true but the statements do not settle it. This is the answer people miss.
- Watch the direction of a rule. “All A are B” tells you nothing about a B that may or may not be an A.
Worked examples
Statements: “Every invoice over $5,000 needs a second signature. The Ridgeway invoice has a second signature.” Conclusion: “The Ridgeway invoice is over $5,000.” The answer is Insufficient Information. The rule says what happens to invoices over $5,000; it does not say smaller invoices never get a second signature.
Statements: “No office that closed early on Friday processed weekend mail. The Elm Street office processed weekend mail.” Conclusion: “The Elm Street office closed early on Friday.” The answer is False. If it had closed early, it could not have processed weekend mail.
Argument items work differently. Suppose an office moved to a four-day week and processed 12% more claims than a year earlier, and the director credits the new schedule. The strongest weakener is a fact that explains the rise another way, such as a new claims system arriving in the same quarter.
Tips for the real Occupational Reasoning Assessment
- Have paper and a pen ready before you start. OPM itself tells candidates to use lists or visuals to organise the information.
- Look for absolute words such as “all”, “only”, “never” and “every”. OPM’s own tips single them out.
- Separate facts from possibilities. A statement that something “may” happen does not make it true.
- Use your five minutes, but answer before the bar runs out. A guess can score; a blank cannot.
- Take breaks between assessments rather than during one, and do this test somewhere quiet.
- Take OPM’s free practice assessment, linked from its help centre, as many times as you like. It gives no feedback, but it shows the real screens.
Practise Occupational Reasoning on CogniPrep
Our version gives you 15 questions, each on its own five-minute clock, with no going back. It mixes True, False or Insufficient Information items with scheduling puzzles and short arguments, and it adapts: right answers bring harder items. You get a score out of 100 that counts harder items for more, plus a breakdown by item type. The question count is ours, because OPM does not publish one.