The CAST exam, explained

What CAST is

CAST — the Contract Agents Selection Tool — is how the EU institutions, agencies and bodies recruit contract agents. Unlike an open competition, it is permanently open: you register in the EPSO database, and you are invited to sit the tests when a department searching the database shortlists your profile.

That invitation is usually short notice. It is the single most important practical fact about CAST preparation, and the reason preparing before you are invited is worth more here than in a procedure with a published timetable.

The three tests

Since the procedure was revised, CAST is purely psychometric. There is no EU-knowledge test, no situational judgement test and no written essay. What remains is three reasoning tests, sat in your first language:

• Verbal reasoning — 20 questions, 35 minutes. A short passage and one question about what it supports.
• Numerical reasoning — 10 questions, 20 minutes. A table or chart of figures and one calculation over it.
• Abstract reasoning — 10 questions, 10 minutes. A series of five figures with the sixth missing.

Verbal is the largest single test: 20 of the 40 questions. It is also, on its own, one of the two gates you have to clear.

The two gates

This is the part most preparation material gets wrong by averaging. CAST is scored as two independent thresholds:

1. Verbal reasoning, scored on its own out of 20.
2. Numerical and abstract reasoning combined, scored together out of 20.

You must clear both. A near-perfect verbal score does nothing for a failed numerical-plus-abstract gate, and the reverse is equally true. Any tool that reports your mock result as a single overall percentage is hiding the thing that actually decides the outcome — which is why the mock here reports each gate separately and never pools them. See pass marks and scoring for the numbers.

What preparation actually changes

Reasoning tests are not knowledge tests, so there is nothing to memorise. What improves with practice is narrower and more useful: recognising a question format instantly, knowing which option traps a given format uses, and pacing. On abstract in particular — one minute per question — the difference between a prepared and an unprepared candidate is mostly the time it takes to see what kind of item they are looking at.

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