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Chris Grayling would like to help you enter solicitors' training!
Verbal reasoning tests are designed to identify an individual’s level of ability to understand and respond to questions about information provided in a passage of text. A candidate is advised to read a given passage of text and then consider the questions which are presented as statements corresponding to the passage. They are then required to decide whether the statement given is true, false, or whether he or she cannot say, given the information contained in the passage.
Consider the following passage about Chris Grayling and “price competitive tendering”:
Price-competitive tendering for criminal defence services will be introduced this autumn under accelerated plans revealed by the justice secretary this morning. In a written ministerial statement, Chris Grayling announced an eight-week consultation on the plans will begin in April – but said that the tender for contracts will open in the autumn. The government expects the first contracts to go live in the autumn of 2014. In a statement issued in December 2011, the government said it would consult on the introduction of price competition in autumn 2013. However Grayling said today: ‘Given the need to achieve savings as quickly as possible, we have decided to accelerate that timetable. The Labour government had sought to introduce price-competitive tendering, but abandoned its proposals after strong resistance from the profession, especially from smaller firms. Grayling said that, through the Legal Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, the government had already sought to reduce legal aid spent on civil cases, but he said that criminal defence represents by far the largest element of the remaining legal aid spend, accounting for over £1bn a year.
The first thing to note that the length of this passage is about 180 words. The length of passages vary in verbal reasoning tests, but this would be a reasonable length. It’s unlikely you will get a story which is politically charged, involving law, or from the news; so this type of article would definitely not be used in a verbal reasoning test.
However, I should like to use this passage and a number of worked examples to illustrate techniques used by people who set these tests.
QUESTION 1
Chris Grayling is the first Lord Chancellor to hold a Doctorate in law.
No information is given about Grayling’s qualifications in this article. You may know that he studied history as an undergraduate student at Cambridge, and indeed holds a degree in that. However, this is inside information. The answer is therefore ‘CANNOT SAY’, as nothing in the passage leads you to say it is either true or false.
QUESTION 2
Chris Grayling announced a four-week consultation.
This statement is DEFINITELY FALSE, as the passage states clearly that Chris Grayling announced an eight-week consultation.
QUESTION 3
According to Chris Grayling, Labour abandoned its proposals after strong resistance from the profession, including from larger firms.
This is difficult as we are told that Labour, “abandoned its proposals after strong resistance from the profession, especially from smaller firms.” Larger firms might have protested against the said proposals, for all we know, so the statement is, as far as the candidate is concerned, NEITHER TRUE NOR FALSE.
QUESTION 4
According to Chris Grayling, the government has already sought to reduce legal aid spent on civil cases, but he said that criminal defence represents a very small element of the remaining legal aid spend.
The second half of this statement is clearly false, given the information given at the end this passage, making the entire statement FALSE. If part of your statement in the question is FALSE, that makes THE WHOLE STATEMENT FALSE.
QUESTION 5
The government expects the first contracts to go live before 2016.
Given that the government expects the first contracts to go live in the autumn of 2014, it must be true that the government expect the first contracts to go live before 2016.
Good luck! And just remember – if you pass that verbal reasoning test thanks to this – just remember that it was Chris Grayling who helped you take your first steps into the legal profession!
Answering an online verbal reasoning question: a topical example
Here is a passage for you to consider!
U.K. unemployment rose by 48,000 to 2.67 million in the three months to the end of December 2011, according to official figures published today. The unemployment rate was 8.4%, the Office for National Statistics said, the highest for 16 years. The number of young people without a job rose 22,000 to 1.04m, taking the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds to 22.2%. The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance in January increased by 6,900 to 1.6 million. While the unemployment rate is now at its highest since 1995, the number of job vacancies rose to 476,000 in the three months to January. A government minister stated that there are signs of stability. An opposition spokesman, however, suggested that today’s figures make for grim reading for the millions of squeezed families desperate for good news on the economy.
This passage would be reasonable simply as a test of verbal reasoning skills by some test providers. It does not contain overly complicated English, and has a total sentence length of 137 words. It possibly wouldn’t be used in a real assessment as it is on a political subject, and online verbal reasoning tests tend to avoid political topics. I would like it to explain the reasoning behind how a passage might be used to test verbal reasoning, however.
Have a go at getting inside the mindset of the world of verbal reasoning! Read each of the sentences, and make up your mind about one of three alternatives.
True means the statement follows logically given the information contained within the passage.?False means the statement cannot logically follow given the information contained within the passage.? Cannot Say means you are not given enough information in the passage to decide.
The key to all of these is you must consider ONLY the information given in the passage. In answering the test, you are advised not to take anything for granted, and do not make unjustified assumptions. This is critically important, especially if you do have background knowledge and/or experience of the subject matter in hand.
More than 3 million were unemployed in the UK on 31 December 2011, according to official figures published today.
FALSE. This is a direct contradiction of the sentence in the first sentence.
The total number of people currently unemployed is the highest it has been for 16 years.
CANNOT SAY. Whilst it is stated that the rate is the highest for 16 years, this does not necessarily mean that the total number of unemployed is the highest it has been for 16 years. This is a classic trap used by designers of online verbal reasoning tests, to see whether you’ve picked up on the word ‘rate’ in the passage. Furthermore, the information given in the passage is given according to the official Office for National Statistics figure, but this is not necessarily the actual figure. You should not do these tests using ‘outside knowledge’ at all. As an aside, there has been a rampant debate in the media about whether the official statistics underestimate the true level of unemployment in recent days.
