Verbal Reasoning Test & Numerical Reasoning Test

Anyone applying for a competitive career anywhere is likely to encounter these two nightmares: a verbal reasoning test and a numerical reasoning test. Well, it’s probably not a nightmare for everyone, since there are some geniuses who simply whiz through both tests without breaking a sweat. However, if you are the average Joe or Jane like I am, you are probably scrambling through the tests and looking at the timer go down faster than you can keep up with.

Anyway, I have managed to pass all the tests that I have taken so far, including Barclays verbal reasoning test, where the difficulty is known to be quite insane. I was very surprised to see the message “Your application is under consideration” after taking the test, since I was expecting to receive the results of whether I passed or failed first. Only after asking around my friends did I know that if you failed, it would show that you failed immediately. By that reasoning, I figured out that I passed and that I’m the only one among my family and friends that passed the verbal component so far.

Passing Barclay’s verbal reasoning component boosted my ego a lot, especially after knowing that a couple of 1st class honors failed the test. However, this is just only the first stage of screening and the subsequent stages of screening should have increasing difficulty, especially with tighter competition recently. To be totally honest, I can’t even say for sure that I will pass the next verbal reasoning test that hops along. I’m not that concerned with numerical reasoning tests, since almost everyone I know of has passed those without breaking too much sweat.

To prepare ourselves for these reasoning tests, I’m quite sure that most people would go online to find similar tests as practice. The problem is that while such practice tests are available, they do not come with answers, so you probably will complete the test and know how you did, but do not know how to improve your results. That does not seem to be too helpful other than giving us an indication of the time needed for us to do the tests.

Part of me feels that it will be really good if practice tests explain the answers to us, but the other part of me think that it’s perhaps structured this way to gauge the candidates’ natural reasoning process. Yet, I’m quite in favor of thinking that a person’s thinking process tend to change with time and maturity, so they should have more practices readily available. Of course, there’s no point in thinking further, since the truth is that these tests do not give answers, so how can we prepare ourselves for taking such reasoning tests?

Taking those tests frequently will probably improve our chances of doing well in such tests, but from my friend’s experience, it does not seem to help. He’s a classic case of someone going to great lengths, since he applied to Barclays three times with three different email address, hoping to pass the verbal reasoning. It seems that heaven was not smiling at him after he failed all three times and resigned to fate.

My point of this post is simple: how can we best improve our chances of doing well in a verbal reasoning test? To end this post, I went around searching to see if there are any trial verbal reasoning tests and I did find some. You should also be able to find some tests if you spend some time. However, when using these tests to practice, do note that verbal reasoning tests are subjected to ambiguity and if your source of taking these practice tests is not a good one, you may not be practicing in your favor.

With that, I end my post and welcome feedback from everyone on how to improve our numerical or verbal reasoning tests results, especially if you are in Human Resource and have some understanding on such tests.