Arctic Shores-Style Tasks

How it is scored

Each task pays points of its own and is capped at a ceiling that falls out of its settings: Balloon by pence banked (capped at what the best strategy banks on average), Arrows and Tickets by right answers less wrong ones, Sequence by the longest run replayed, Security Door by how close each stop lands, Token Search by rounds finished less errors, Power Generator by how much of each target you reach, Order, Balance and Patterns by right rounds, Team Sales by what you and the company earn, and Prediction by hits above chance. The ceilings add up to 795.

The points are ours. Arctic Shores publishes nothing about its marking: the real assessment scores how you behave and matches it to a profile the employer set for the role, so there is no total and no pass mark. Read the line under each task at the end rather than the number.

Where we had to choose

What is reported: a pool of fourteen tasks (Balloon, Arrows, Sequence, Expressions, Order, Token Search, Power Generator, Security Door, Balance, Team Sales, Tickets, Patterns, Analysis, Prediction), of which an employer picks eight to twelve, in a sitting of twenty five to forty five minutes; the result is a behaviour profile rather than a mark; the only official rehearsal is one practice task inside the invitation. The task list and the rough settings come from candidate reports and prep sites, and are consistent between them.

What is not published: any clock, item count, burst point, rule or how a behaviour is derived. Every number here is ours, and every one is tighter than what is reported: shorter windows, more items, faster pacing, reminders that vanish sooner, hidden rules that remember what you pressed. The aim is that the real thing feels slow.

Two tasks are left out. Expressions needs photographs of real faces, which we will not fake. Analysis is a table-and-chart multiple choice test that the Numerical Reasoning drill already covers.

What each task is believed to read

• Balloon. Risk appetite: how far you push against an unknown burst point, and whether each colour teaches you. Bank at about half the pumps that colour has burst at so far. The clock punishes dithering.
• Arrows. Attention: holding focus on one arrow under interference, and switching to a reversed rule. Look only at the centre. When the notice appears, read it: it will not be repeated.
• Sequence. Working memory: how much ordered spatial information you can hold as it speeds up. Say the positions to yourself as they light. Chunk them in threes.
• Tickets. Task switching: how much a change of question costs you, and whether you keep the rules once the reminders go. Read the position first, then the ticket. Top means number, bottom means shape.
• Security Door. Attention: sustained timing under a rising pace, and adapting when the target starts moving. Press a fraction early: the dial moves between your decision and your press.
• Token Search. Working memory: how well you keep track of where you have already been, and whether you search in a system. Search in a fixed order and keep to it. The order is your memory.
• Power Generator. Learning: how quickly you work out hidden rules from feedback, including ones with memory. Test each button twice running and then alternating before you commit to one.
• Order. Learning: inferring several rules at once from a short series and applying them together. Take the attributes one at a time. Anything that has not changed will not change.
• Balance. Planning: working relations out from what is given before committing, rather than trying combinations. Turn the scales into ratios first. The answer never copies the given pan.
• Team Sales. Cooperation: whether you cooperate, how you respond to being undercut, and whether you read the other team. Price high until they do not, and watch for a team that turns late.
• Patterns. Attention: finding the one feature that splits nine tiles eight against one, quickly. Scan one property at a time: shape, count, fill, colour, mark, sides.
• Prediction. Learning: learning odds from feedback and updating when the evidence turns. Stay on a door that pays. Switch after a run of misses, not after one.

None of this is a way to game a profile. The behaviour a bank wants in an analyst is not the one it wants on a trading desk, and the profile is set per role. The honest gain from practice is that no task is new to you when its clock starts, and that the real settings feel roomy.

How to work through one

Read each brief properly, because the real one gives you one practice task and no second explanation. Sit it once at a normal pace: the battery is not timed as a whole, only the tasks inside it are. Use a keyboard where you can (space to pump or stop, arrows for left and right, Y and N, H and L, number keys for doors and buttons, and the QWER, ASDF, ZXCV rows for grids), and on a phone use the big panels. When it finishes, read the readouts, then run it again only if a task's rules still surprised you.