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.
