How hard is the NZ Police recruitment test?

Why is a cognitive test harder than it looks?

Because the usual preparation instincts do not apply. There is no material to learn, so people either do nothing or practise randomly, and both leave the same gap: the first time they meet an abstract reasoning sequence under time is on the day.

Unfamiliarity is most of the difficulty. Not intelligence, not aptitude, the simple cost of working out what a question type wants while the clock runs.

Which reasoning area do people find hardest?

It varies more than you would expect, which is the argument for measuring rather than guessing. Two rough patterns: candidates who have been out of formal study for a while tend to struggle most with abstract sequences, and candidates straight out of school tend to struggle most with situational judgement, because it rewards workplace judgement they have not yet built.

Is situational judgement harder than the reasoning sections?

Different, rather than harder. There is no calculation to get wrong, but there is also no way to check your answer. What unsettles people is the absence of certainty: several options look defensible, and you have to rank rather than solve. The scoring logic is explained here.

What is the pass mark?

New Zealand Police does not publish one, and we are not going to invent a figure or repeat one from a forum. What can be said honestly: recruitment is competitive, so the useful goal is performing as well as you can rather than clearing a number someone told you about.

How much does preparation change your result?

Preparation does not raise your underlying reasoning ability much, and anyone promising that is overselling. What it reliably removes are two costs that have nothing to do with ability:

• Format shock, the time lost the first time you meet each question type.
• Method drift: attacking questions inconsistently, so your accuracy depends on which approach you happened to reach for.

On a timed assessment, those two are worth a great deal. That is the honest case for practice, and it is the whole of it.

If you decide to prepare properly, the four-week plan sets out the sequence.