Home » Posts tagged 'verbal reasoning' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: verbal reasoning
Psychometric tests for training contract applications
Please note that these videos are from the new Legal Recruit website. Legal Recruit is a project by students in the Legal Awareness Society, a society run by students at BPP for students of law. This Society has nothing to do with BPP in any official capacity, although it is a registered Society at BPP. BPP does not support or endorse any of these independent specific initiatives.
These videos are merely demonstrated for educational purposes, especially to help candidates with visual impairments and reading difficulties to understand the nature of reasonable adjustments in online assessment, and the obligations of the test providers and the law firms ensuring fair assessment. Full details for these videos are provided on the YouTube sites whose links have been provided.
Reading difficulties and visual impairments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luX9qny0T-4&feature=channel_video_titlePsychometric tests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duUwqvVDpMY
What are situational judgement tests?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7JMlQZbBYk
Two 'Legal Recruit' books on online tests for law students, pub date 1 Nov 2011
It is important to note that, whilst ‘Legal Recruit’ is an important key initiative from the BPP Legal Awareness Society to encourage a business culture in law, ‘Legal Recruit’ is absolutely nothing to do with BPP media, nor indeed represents any official teaching or guidance from BPP.
Book 1 – Practical verbal reasoning questions for law students (111 pages)
This book has carefully designed verbal reasoning questions, of the ‘True’, ‘False’, or ‘Cannot Say’ variety. Two questions follow each of the passages together with full explanations, and reading passages cover a variety of subjects, including biology, business, economics, education, engineering, environment, geography, geology, health and safety, human relations, medicine, modern languages, physics, technology, and transport. Readers of this title will benefit from the general explanation as to how to do these tests, and from the worked examples, such that they feel much more comfortable when they come to do such tests for real for training contract or vacation placement applications. The book will also be also of interest for applicants to corporates who use these tests for recruitment purposes. This title has a publication date of 1 November 2011, and is only available to download for £7.50 from the Legal Recruit website.
Book 2 – Practical situational judgements questions for law students (77 pages)
This book has carefully-designed questions in six competences commonly assessed in situational judgement tests. Situational judgement tests are used by some law firms to ascertain the suitability of a law student for a training contract. These competences are problem solving, proactive attitude, commitment to excellence, communication and negotiation, teamwork, and attention-to-detail and leadership. The book will also be also of interest for applicants to corporates who use these tests for recruitment purposes. Getting focused on these competences will help law students to understand the relevance of these skills to recruitment and their general professional life. This title has a publication date of 1 November 2011, and is only available to download for £7.50 from the Legal Recruit website.
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!
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 sample verbal reasoning test of SHL Direct
Please note that since this post was published, I have built my own platform to help law students shine at tests such as the SHL verbal reasoning test. My platform doesn’t have the same number of questions, time taken per passage, word length, necessarily, as ‘the real thing’ and I have no knowledge of any of the real SHL exemplars, but I hope you find the platform useful. A lot of the stuff on it is free in fact – you can find it here.
As my own Ph.D. was in cognitive neuropsychology, I must admit that I find the design of the verbal reasoning test by SHL Direct fascinating. These days a candidate for a training contract will need to complete an online verbal reasoning test prepared by SHL Direct for the law firm; sometimes the Watson Glaser is used in preference.
There is no doubt that the new-look practice test presented on their website is extremely useful for aspiring candidates for legal training contracts. There are 17 stories in the practice test. The word count per passage varies from 70 to 153, with a mean length of 107. The length of the passages therefore vary somewhat, with a standard deviation of 27. The word count per sentence also makes for interesting reading. Some sentences are as short as 8 words; the longest sentence has 49 words (but broken up with semi-colons). The use of semi-colons is actually very infrequent, and overall it appears that the passages are written in plain English, with no spelling or grammar errors. The passages avoid American spelling or American English. The mean number of words in a sentence is 24, with a standard deviation of only 8.
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. The topics are sometimes hard to classify, and a popular theme of some of the passages are where there appear to be quantifiable trends. I think the subjects are approximately as follows: geography and the environment, economics, technology, business, human resources, transport, business, biology, medicine, health and safety, technology, biology, education, environment and energy, and geology. I remember seeing a physics-based question in a real test, but I have never seen a chemistry-based question. I am sure that questions in other fields do exist. I have seen in my time other preparatory questions, from other test providers, on (non-controversial) political initiatives, and modern languages, for example.
I feel on the whole the questions are superbly set, with very clear instructions. In the practice test, you are allowed to go backwards, although in the real test you may not get 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. Candidates for the verbal reasoning test for training contract applications seem to stand to benefit much from suitable practice.
