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A new free sample practice test to help law students excel at online applications assessments
I will be launching my new website ‘Legal Recruit’ to help law students become really good at two of the most important online assessments for legal recruitment.
These are currently verbal reasoning tests and situational judgement tests.
It’s essential you practice these before doing them ‘for real’ through online training contract and vacation scheme applications in the City corporate firms.
I believe that it’s a shame for students to come a cropper on these tests, and not get called for interview, even if they meet interview requirements elsewhere, such as II.1 or relevant vacation scheme placement. A colleague of mine – very well-known, in fact – refers to this phenomenon as “death by spreadsheet”.
The new website is here http://legal-recruit.org/.
I have been working extremely hard on it the last few weeks. Please feel to look around. Some of the features – like the main assessment ‘zone’ – are disabled, as I have not formally launched this yet.
For those who are interested in some of the relevant theory and evidence underlying this new website designed for law students, you might like to go to this blog http://legalrecruit.org/. I keep this blog up-to-date with useful info. There’s also a twitter thread on which I put up interesting stuff, including stories of the type which could easily feature in a verbal reasoning test, ranging from geology to technology: http://twitter.com/#!/legal_recruit.
If you go to http://legal-recruit.org/, you will see there’s a toolbar ‘about the tests’. If you go there, you’ll then see another toolbar, and if you go to any of the pages there, you’ll be able to download a free factsheet.
If you click register http://legal-recruit.org/register/ you will then be invited to sign-up. Sign-up involves you suggesting a username, and you’ll be sent a password by email to an e-mail address you suggest. You can then use the username and password to login (using the login button in the top-right corner) http://legal-recruit.org/wp-login.php.
Once you login, you’ll be able to do the trial http://legal-recruit.org/trial/. You should only do the trial if you are indeed of graduate level, i.e. you have graduated.
This is a practice test which gives you a very good idea how a real asssessment of the type routinely done for real training contract applications. After you do this test, you’ll be able to look at a full report as to how you do did.
You’ll know I have a bugbear about legal recruiters not entering into the letter of the law (or spirit more often) regarding ‘reasonable adjustments’ for tests. This website will allow you to alter the text-size meaning that some law students will not needlessly suffer in struggling to read the questions. For the practice assessments to be offered on my site from 1 November 2011, registered users will be able to vary the time that they can take for each test from 19 minutes to 39 minutes. You can read more about this here if you’re interested.
After taking the test, you’ll be confidentially be able to read the report on this link (if you’re logged in). Don’t worry – nobody else gets to see this report, not even us!
ALL OF THIS PRACTICE IS FOR FREE – ENJOY!
The new @Legal_Recruit verbal reasoning practice assessment for law students
The @Legal_Recruit system (which will be available here) is a very attractive easy-to-use cloud-based service which will allow @Legal_Recruit learners to complete sample tests, under real assessment conditions.
It will be available on Monday 3 October 2011 for the first time.
Current law students, who are doing the GDL, LPC, LLB(Hons) or LLM, especially those who are seeking training contracts or vacation placements for 2013/4/5 being made available in the next academic year may find this new service/product useful. It will be available on the internet via a secure website, and will cost £7.50 for unrestricted lifetime use. All Legal Recruit learners will have their own secure website username and password, and be invited to participate in the development of the huge bank of validated questions. These questions are set in a fair way, with due attention to equality, diversity and culture.
This product has been built because it is felt by many that law students, the staff of their colleagues/universities (including their academics and their career services) and corporate law recruiting managers that the pivotal importance of the verbal reasoning test is grossly underestimated. This is not sensible, given the intense effort needed to complete any qualification in law. However, if your performance in a verbal reasoning test, and you fail to meet the cut-off score, it is possible that you will not be invited for interview, despite having a II.1 or above. This is clearly a tragedy.
Such practice will be ideal for any law students needing to complete a SHL Direct assessment for their real training contract/vacation placement application. Candidates are strongly advised to look, as a top priority, the practice tests in the practice area of the SHL website. There you can take a full-length verbal reasoning test which has been made available from the main SHL Direct website and it’s well worth looking at the example questions. You’ll also most likely enjoy looking at the advice given about verbal reasoning tests on leading corporate law recruitment sites, such as Eversheds and Clifford Chance. Obviously, Legal_Recruit does not actively endorse any of the entities above, or vice versa.
There will be very clear instructions in the @Legal_Recruit practice assessments which are akin to the current SHL verbal reasoning instructions. In the practice test, you are allowed to go backwards, although in the real assessment you will not be given this option. You must complete the practice examples before you do the test, and you are told not to press any function keys or do any background jobs such as printing during the test itself.
The word count per passage will ideally vary from 70 to 150, with a mean length of 107. Passages will avoid as far as possible the use of semi-colons, and be of no shorter than 8-10 words. They will be written in plain English, with no spelling or grammar errors. The passages will therefore avoid American spelling or American English. The mean number of words in a sentence will be about 15-20.
Assessments will consist of 30 questions, containing 15 passages (2 questions per passage). The 15 passages will be selected at random by the Legal_Recruit system from a huge database consisting of an equal number of questions in the following 16 subject areas.
- Biology
- Business
- Economics
- Education
- Engineering
- Environment
- Geography
- Geology
- Health and Safety
- Human resources
- Medicine
- Modern Languages
- Physics
- Technology
- Transport
@Legal_Recruit follows the leading twitter accounts in the world which daily produce news stories, which make excellent narratives for the verbal reasoning assessment that Legal_Recruit will be offering.
Legal_Recruit learners will be able to choose a maximum time permitted from 19 to 39 minutes; this is to that it’s easy to do the assessments with reasonable adjustments for learners who will benefit from them to allow them to perform on a ‘level-playing field’.
It’s interesting that there is no subject bias at all in the exemplars. Interestingly the passages appears to avoid contentious branding, politics, or subjects which are generally controversial.
It is essential for our system to work for our questions to be carefully set in keeping with the real verbal reasoning tests which our Legal_Recruit learners will face in their real assessments set by SHL for their training contract/vacation placements. If you would like to participate for free, and receive immediate feedback, in our sample assessments, please direct message @legalaware or @legal_recruit, and if there are any problems in me following you, please do let me know immediately, and I will remedy. We benefit from obtaining a huge bank of normative data, which indicates to us that all the questions are of the same (correct) standard, and from being able to give you an accurate indication of where you sit on the normal distribution curve.
You may enjoy following up-to-date developments in online psychometric assessment on the @SHLGROUP twitter feed.
