Does anyone know what kind of percentage an employer would be looking for, or would it be judged against the other applicants.

I have to complete a numerical and verbal in the next few days, and whilst the ones I have done seem okay. I find myself either zooming through it and guessing a little or simply running out of time.

The interviewer seemed to feel the tests were not completely relevant to the job but had to be done, which is fine except the maths I use tend to be pertinent to my line of work not general.

What is the role you're going for and what are the tests you're taking?

I've worked in the assessment industry for a few years now and can say that 'intelligence' is a key factor in helping to define leadership capability, so if the role you're going for is a leadership role (formal, i.e. managerially responsible), then the results will have a bearing.

But, they are never taken (or should not ever be taken) in isolation. It's part of a bigger picture and should be used in conjunction with other assessment mechanisms.

Its a design role, I would say mid level. I just have a feeling I'm going to score around 60 to 70% which I reckon in these type of tests is not enough.

well one school of thought and the one i subscribe to is that you should never guess …

we were also told no-one finishes the tests (after we got the jobs) by the hr staff

i didnt complete all the questions but those i did complete i know i got right – i got into the top 7% of uk graduates who had taken this particular testing method. strikes me that there was some sort of marking down for wrong answers. Haven spoken to the others who got jobs no one finished and also none of them guessed answers and rushed it ….

we had three parts , word association , verbal reasoning and maths

Some companies do those together with interviews. I know for a fact I aced quite a few of them but I was rubbish at interviews. So they kind of take both into consideration. Let alone that once you do a couple and you get how they work you do much better afterwards.

Why do they do these tests, do they think that I cheated to get my 2.1 Hons Engineering degree?

As someone who gets appalling scores in aptitude tests, I've actually done rather well in industry. I vow to spoil future tests by writing in MarcDatzSpeak and deliberatly choosing the wrong numerical answers.

Buzz I do sympathise; I've just gone through the mill myself and have done around a dozen of these things over the last seven months of job hunting. I have an MBA from a top 20 in the world business school and finished in the top 10% of my class. The problem is that in life, you have to continually prove yourself; you don't get to do it just once and then sit back.

In relation to a design role, the validity of cognitive ability tests (this being the technical term for intelligence tests) is harder to understand but it can be a perfectly reasonable part of a company’s overall talent strategy to employ minimum scores.

Assessment for suitability is a highly technical subject and is driven largely by measurement and validity. The best approaches combine cognitive ability, experience/competency based interviews, motivational analysis and simulations to really assess accurately (anything over 0.4 correlation coefficient is regarded as being reasonably good, the best you can get to is 0.7 – I know the engineers now will be deriding these figures but it's an economic argument) a person's ability to do a role.

Well I just completed them, the verbal one seemed okay, where as the numeracy test there was a lot of half calculations with guessing

I did a test paper once the said in bold letters READ ALL QUESTIONS BEFORE ANSWERING the very last question was THERE IS NO NEED TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS. Amazing how many people just opened the paper and started to fill in the questions as they went.