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A new way to do practice online psychometric tests by law students for legal recruitment
Launched in 2011, ‘Legal Recruit’ is an innovative, totally independent, platform for law students to practice online psychometric tests. These tests are routinely provided by SHL Direct and Kenexa to assist in the recruitment of suitable trainees for training contracts and vacation placements in City law firms. ‘Legal Recruit’ only contains unique, original learning material, not available from any learning provider.
This platform therefore will be ideal for any student who needs to complete a psychometric test for his or her own application. It’s usually expected that a candidate scores in a high percentile, and often firms will not call students who do not meet a minimum standard of performance. On the ‘Legal Recruit’, learners receive an immediate report on their performance, included a detailed breakdown of where they did well on individual items and where they got the answer wrong.
The platform offers students a chance to do 15 full-length verbal reasoning tests and 4 situational judgement tests, for £10. However, there is much free material on the site, including a chance to do a practice online verbal reasoning test for free. 76 graduates have so far taken the test and the average score is 21.61. There are lots of free factsheets, including an introduction to psychometric tests, an introduction to verbal reasoning tests, an introduction to situational judgement tests, visual impairments and reading difficulties, how to write a cover sheet, and how to complete the online application form, and lots of exclusive videos too. We hope to launch a numerical reasoning part of the website shortly.
We were very happy when, last month, the ‘Legal Recruit’ was chosen by the Queen Mary and Westfield College (University of London) Law Students’ Union mock ‘assessment day’, for practice by their law students in verbal reasoning and situational judgement tests. This is excellent co-operation between two active law student groups.
The feedback for ‘Legal Recruit’ has been extremely promising, including from current trainees and law students. There is a free book of 150 verbal reasoning questions that anyone can download for free, also containing original unique specimen test material, and 2 books for comprehensive practice at verbal reasoning and situational judgement tests, priced extremely competitively at £7.5o each.
The link to Legal Recruit is here.
It is important to note that, whilst the website is entirely the intellectual property of ‘Legal Recruit’ (an initiative by students in the BPP Legal Awareness Society run by BPP students for BPP students), this project including product is absolutely nothing o do with BPP. The BPP Legal Awareness Society strives to explain the competitive advantage of businesses through law, and to explain compliance with the law in achieving business strategy.
Gazelles
This is a typical question, one of 300, which I am writing for my practice verbal reasoning platform.
12 Young, fast-growing businesses are more likely to have their loan applications rejected in Britain than in any other leading country in Europe, according to European Union figures. So-called “gazelles” — small, dynamic enterprises that are only a handful of years old — had a harder time clinching bank loans than in other top Western European nations last year, Eurostat numbers showed. The British rejection rate was 35.6 percent last year, up from 6.8 percent in 2007, according to data released this month. Among the larger EU nations, the only countries that came close were Denmark and the Netherlands, where failure rates on loan applications were 32 percent and 29 percent, respectively. The number of rejections among small British information and communications technology companies was particularly high, at 38.4 percent.
‘Gazelles’ sometimes turn into ‘large antelopes’, in business terms – these are large, incumbent companies with much inertia.
CANNOT SAY. No reference is given to the term ‘large antelopes’ in this passage.
The Netherlands have the third highest rejection rate in the whole of Europe for successfully obtaining bank loans in Europe.
CANNOT SAY. Whilst this is possible from the passage, it cannot be stated as a fact, particularly since the passage strictly speaking refers to countries in Western Europe.
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.
The BPP LegalAware Situational Judgement Test
This situational judgement test is not a product of BPP. It is an entirely original test made by members of the BPP student society, ‘the BPP Legal Awareness Society’ [link here], which is independent and separate from BPP.
Legal recruiters often use the ‘situational judgment test’ to determine whether you might be suitable for their culture, or not, despite (or in addition to) your formal qualifications. Often doing the test can be a useful learning exercise for both the candidate and the law firm, to help to decide whether a candidate is really suitable for that firm or not. Current advice is that candidates should do the test honestly and in peace (e.g. in a quiet room); that they should try not to second-guess what the employer wants, but answer the questions directly. It might be useful to be aware of the law firm’s core competencies, but often legal advisors say that a candidate’s “best asset” in such applications is their common sense.
Please have a go at answering these ten scenarios. We’ll be able to build up a bank of results of what most people would do in these circumstances. Whereas law firms will probably get their senior people to do the test to cultivate the results, our results are most likely to represent a mixed sample.
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