Pre-employment cognitive tests

Fifty questions. Fifteen minutes.

The CCAT and the Wonderlic are ordinary questions at an impossible pace. Practise them on the real clock — free, no account, and an explanation for every question when the time is up.

Fifty questions on the CCAT. The dark ones are the 24 that the average test taker answers correctly — Criteria Corp’s own figure. It also publishes that fewer than 1% of candidates answer all fifty. The test is not built to be finished, and knowing that before you sit it is worth more than any question you could memorise.

Take the CCAT test Take the Wonderlic test
Criteria Corp

CCAT

15 min 50 questions 18s each

Criteria’s cognitive aptitude test: verbal, maths and logic, and spatial reasoning, in one fifteen-minute run with no calculator and no penalty for a wrong answer.

360 practice questions Wonderlic, Inc.

Wonderlic

12 min 50 questions 14.4s each

The test everyone means by “the Wonderlic” — now the timed section of Wonderlic Select. Fifty questions in twelve minutes, getting harder as they go.

480 practice questions National Testing Network

Police entry exam

25 min 30 questions our practice run

The written parts of the police entry exam run at National Testing Network centres: reading, written language skills and situational judgment. NTN publishes no question count, so the length here is ours rather than theirs.

150 practice questions electrical training ALLIANCE

IBEW

97 min 69 questions two timed papers

The aptitude battery for an IBEW/NECA electrical apprenticeship — algebra and functions, then reading comprehension. The one test here whose publisher prints both lengths, so both papers run at the real ones.

100 practice questions Biddle Consulting Group

CritiCall

20 min 30 questions our practice run

The 911 dispatcher and calltaker test. Its publisher sells a library of modules and each agency picks its own, so there is no fixed paper — and the four parts here are the ones that can honestly be practised in writing.

200 practice questions Pearson TalentLens (the Bennett) and Criteria Corp (the Wiesen)

Mechanical aptitude

15 min 30 questions our practice run

Levers, pulleys, gears, pressure and circuits — what employers send for trades, maintenance and operator roles. Two publishers sell a test under this name at two different lengths, and both full-length runs are here.

150 practice questions Cal-JAC (FCTC), FPSI, I/O Solutions and Ergometrics

Firefighter written test

25 min 30 questions our practice run

The firefighter entry written exam, which is four different tests depending on who is hiring. Mechanical reasoning, maths and reading you have to remember are what all of them ask for; the video section and the CPAT get pages with no questions.

150 practice questions

Three things this site will not tell you

Every prep site in this category prints them anyway, which is how you can tell what is researched and what is filler.

A score you need
Employers set their own bar per role and do not publish it. Tables of “target scores by job title” are invented — including the ones that look authoritative.
How many questions of each type
Most publishers here break nothing down by question type, so those timed tests deal the types evenly and say so. Two exceptions run opposite ways: the IBEW battery, whose publisher prints both papers’ lengths, and the FCTC firefighter test, whose free study guide prints all four section counts. Both pages print them back. CritiCall is the far end — the agency assembles the paper, so nobody can count it at all.
Real questions from the test
The item banks are confidential. Every question here is original, written to the published format — the counts, the clock, the types.

Before you sit it

How the CCAT is scored

What a CCAT score actually is: a raw count out of 50 plus a percentile, no penalty for wrong answers, and a published average of 24.

Wonderlic vs Wonderlic Select

Wonderlic Select is the current assessment: three sections, one timed.

How to pace 50 questions in 15 minutes

4. What that actually means to do: how to decide in two seconds whether to attempt a question, and when to stop trying to finish.

How the IBEW aptitude test is scored

What an IBEW aptitude test score is, what the publisher reports, and why nobody — including the applicant — is given the number.

What is on the CritiCall test

The CritiCall module library, why no two agencies test the same thing, the four decision rules the publisher tells candidates to learn, and what it publishes.

Which firefighter written test will I take?

Four publishers sell four different firefighter entry exams. What each contains, what each publishes, and how to find out which one is yours.

Bennett or Wiesen: which mechanical test?

Two tests are sold as “the mechanical aptitude test” and they are different lengths. What each publisher prints about the Bennett and the Wiesen, and what both actually ask.

Which test will my employer use

How to tell a CCAT from a Wonderlic before you sit it: the publisher, the clock, the invitation email, and what to do when the email does not say.

1590 practice questions across every test here, all of them written for this site. Every figure quoted anywhere here — question counts, time limits, averages, what is and is not penalised — comes from a publisher’s own candidate document, listed below with the date it was read.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the documents below, with the day it was read. Requirements change — open the source if you need today's wording.

Hiring Test Practice is independent practice material and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Criteria Corp, Wonderlic, Inc., National Testing Network, the electrical training ALLIANCE, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, NECA, Biddle Consulting Group, Inc., Pearson Education, Inc. or its TalentLens business, the California Firefighter Joint Apprenticeship Committee or the Firefighter Candidate Testing Center, Fire and Police Selection, Inc., I/O Solutions, Inc., Ergometrics & Applied Personnel Research, Inc., the International Association of Fire Fighters or the International Association of Fire Chiefs. CCAT® is a registered trademark of Criteria Corp; Wonderlic® is a registered trademark of Wonderlic, Inc.; CritiCall is a trademark of Biddle Consulting Group, Inc.; Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test is a trademark of Pearson Education, Inc.; FCTC and CPAT are used to name tests administered by others. Test names are used only to describe what this material prepares you for. Every question here is original and none is taken from any actual assessment. Cal-JAC and FCTC publish that materials supplied directly by them are the only authorized FCTC Written Test materials; this site is one of the outside sources that warning refers to, and it links their free study guide rather than reproducing it.