The level of difficulty of your numerical aptitude test

Numerical aptitude tests are used, in the UK, to measure job seekers at different organisational levels (such as graduate, professional and manager) and occupations/industries. To ensure that the numerical aptitude test is accurately measuring job seekers’ abilities and potential, companies administering psychometric testing typically have a broad range of numerical aptitude tests with different levels of difficulty and benchmarks.

The level of difficulty of the numerical aptitude test you will receive is determined by the following factors:

The type of position you are applying for – are you applying for a graduate or managerial position? Are you applying for a professional (non-managerial) or managerial position? Are you applying for a mid-level or senior managerial position? When you are applying for a graduate position, employers expect you to demonstrate stronger numerical reasoning skills than a non-graduate. Similarly, if you are applying for a managerial position, you are expected to show stronger numerical reasoning skills than a graduate.

The type of occupation/industry you are applying for – are you applying for a position in HR, marketing or engineering? For example, if you apply as a graduate for an engineering position, you will be expected to show higher numerical reasoning skills than if you applied for a position in marketing.

What is a more difficult numerical aptitude test?

Each numerical aptitude test has a certain level of difficulty that is fairly consistent across all its test questions. However, you can expect the questions at the beginning of the numerical test to be simpler than those towards the end.

The level of difficulty of your numerical aptitude test is typically defined by three factors:

• complexity of numerical data,
• amount of numerical data and distractors and,
• time constraints.

As the complexity of numerical data increases, the numerical aptitude test becomes more difficult. Complexity of data is typically related to the number of transformations or calculations you need to do to find the answer. The amount of data relates to the wealth of data offered in a test question. Some questions only offer the numerical data you need to get to the answer, but others have much more data that is used to distract your attention and consume precious time. Typically, a numerical aptitude test with a higher level of difficulty would have more distracting data. The third component is the time limitation. A simple rule of thumb for time constraints is that a numerical test question should take you around 45 to 60 seconds to complete. Therefore, a test at a higher level of difficulty will allow you less time for each test question. 

Practising for your numerical aptitude test

The levels of difficulty of numerical aptitude tests mean that even if you have a good background in maths and you are good in solving numerical questions, you are still likely to hit some hurdles when you are taking your numerical aptitude test. Therefore, we recommend that you practise as much as you can before taking the real numerical test.

Online, practice numerical aptitude tests 

You can practise by taking our practice numerical aptitude tests, which are designed to match the level of difficulty of the real numerical aptitude test that you are likely to receive. Upon completing each practice numerical test, you will receive an immediate full test report including:

• your total score compared against others applying for a similar role
• a list of your correct and wrong answers
• detailed answer explanations for each test question so you can learn how to avoid making a similar mistake in your real numerical aptitude test.

Online, numerical aptitude test course 

You can take our online numerical aptitude test course to learn about the strategies and tactics for efficiently solving numerical test questions, brush-up on formulas to calculate percentages, work efficiencies, distances, exchange rate, time travelled etc.

The numerical aptitude course also includes the do’s and don’t’s of the numerical aptitude test and numerical aptitude test questions examples.

We strongly recommend that you take the numerical aptitude test course to get the ‘ins and outs’ of this test. Then apply this knowledge into practice using our practice tests.