The Psychometric Test

I spent the entirety of my undergraduate career blissfully unaware of the Psychometric Test. For those of you lucky enough to be uninitiated into this cult of despair, allow me to enlighten you. They are the online logic tests which most major companies and public sector graduate programmes require their applicants to pass before even being considered for an interview.

Fundamentally they serve as the gatekeepers to the hallowed job that will set you on the ‘right course for life’. They separate the wheat from the chaff; the employable from me. It’s like being in the queue for an exclusive club. You can see the people inside, cavorting, laughing, drinking and generally living the good life. But a particularly choosy bouncer is stopping you getting into the party of your dreams. Only, it’s not your white trainers and crew cut he objects to, it’s your complete inability to deduce the compound interest on a five year loan in ten seconds flat from an illegibly pixellated line graph.

A typical verbal reasoning question might read as follows: Read the following passage, then say whether the statement below is (a) True (b) False or (c) Cannot Tell, without using any previous knowledge of the subject matter to inform your answer.

Passage

“In a recent Stand News poll, an overwhelming 92% of St Andrews students claimed that they either are, or have the potential to be, a BNOC (Big Name On Campus*). Despite this high figure, Stand research suggests that only 2% of the St Andrews population have the requisite social standing, networking skills and disengagement from reality to actually achieve BNOC status.”

Statement

“All BNOCs are berks”

Clearly, (a) is the correct answer. Unfortunately, that answer has been informed by my innate knowledge of the subject, and thus I would have failed the Verbal Reasoning component of this particular Psychometric Test.

And therein lies the rub. Psychometric Tests have literally bugger all to do with real world ability, knowledge or common sense. Being a BNOC won’t get you a graduate job, writing angry articles for the Stand won’t get you a job, setting up the student jazz society won’t get you a job (I genuinely laboured under this delusion), unless you’re able to piss through the eye of the needle that is ‘Numerical Reasoning No. 5’. All you’re left to do is repeatedly practise a test with no inherent value whatsoever until you get into the inner sanctum: the 90th percentile of candidates. What an utterly revolting waste of time, which frankly I could be putting to better use studying the carpet.

I – and I assume all others who are terminally hopeless at this application process – end up feeling like the dogs in an RSPCA Christmas appeal, crudely lolloping on all fours, being whipped on by an evil corporate circus master to jump through hoops of fire. If we complete his arbitrary tasks without serious injury, the circus master showers us with a bucket of shit, just so the baying audience has something to watch.

All the while, successful applicants (the sexy acrobats of this fetid amusement) do somersaults overhead, sneering down on their less fortunate graduate peers, casually tossing down the loose change of their sickeningly large salaries, just so you know they’ve got cash to flash.

God, what I’d give to be one of the sexy acrobats…

*Acronym clarified solely for my Father’s sake.

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