CAST exam tips that are worth the time

1. Prepare before you are invited

CAST is permanently open and the invitation to sit the tests usually arrives at short notice, once a department shortlists your profile from the database. There is no published timetable to plan backwards from. An hour a week now is worth considerably more than a panicked weekend after the email arrives.

2. Work out which gate is at risk, then spend the time there

CAST has two independent gates — verbal on its own, and numerical plus abstract combined — and no compensation between them. Practice on the gate you are already clearing comfortably buys you nothing.

Sit a full mock early, before you feel ready. Its only job at that stage is to tell you which gate is marginal, and it is a much better answer than your own sense of which test you find harder.

3. Read the explanation on the ones you got right

The most common way to plateau is to review only mistakes. On a five-option question you will get a fair number right by eliminating four rather than by seeing the rule, and those are the items that will turn into errors under time pressure. Reading why the key is the key on a question you answered correctly is where a lot of the actual improvement lives.

4. Practise untimed first, then timed

Drilling under a clock before the formats are automatic just trains you to rush. Practice here is deliberately untimed and marks each answer immediately, so you can take a question apart properly. Move to the timed mock once you are consistently getting the format right, and use it to calibrate pace rather than to learn.

5. Learn the traps, not the topics

Wrong options in a well-built reasoning test are not random; they are the specific mistakes candidates make, manufactured on purpose.

• Verbal: options that overstate a quantifier, upgrade a correlation to a cause, or bring in a fact the passage never gave.
• Numerical: the right calculation on the wrong row, percentage change divided by the wrong base, percentage points confused with per cent.
• Abstract: a rule applied one step short, or a cycle that was not allowed to wrap around.

Once you can name the trap an option is using, you stop being tempted by it. That is most of what practice is for.

6. Pace by test, because the tests are paced differently

• Abstract: one minute per question. The tightest clock in the exam and no recovery time. An item you cannot see in ninety seconds should be guessed and left.
• Numerical: two minutes per question. Enough to compute carefully once, not enough to compute twice. Estimate first to kill options.
• Verbal: about 1 minute 45. Enough to read once carefully and check one option against the text. Candidates who run out here are usually re-reading.

7. Never leave a question blank

There is no negative marking, so a wrong answer and an unanswered one score identically. With thirty seconds left on a part, answering everything still open is free expected value.

What is not worth your time

• Studying EU institutional knowledge for the reasoning tests. Current CAST has no knowledge component. It may matter elsewhere in your application; it will not appear here.
• Memorising question banks. Recognising a specific item helps you on that item and nowhere else, which is also why the numerical and abstract banks here are generated rather than fixed.
• Grinding without reviewing. Volume with no explanation attached is the least efficient form of practice available.