Sova Assessment Guides

How to use these guides

These pages exist to remove the guesswork from a UK graduate-scheme online assessment: what each stage is, how it is scored, what the employer is looking for, and what to do in the weeks before you sit it. Every guide is written for candidates, checked against the employer’s own published material, and dated so you can see how current it is.

Start with the format, not the practice

Start by checking which sections are named in your invitation and whether any time limit or deadline applies. Sova does not publish navigation or backtracking rules, so read the on-screen instructions before beginning each activity.

Then practise the sections you will actually be given

Employers use different combinations of reasoning, scenario-judgement and personality stages, and some add stages we do not simulate at all — gamified exercises and recorded video interviews among them. Each employer page lists which stages you face, and which of them you can practise here versus prepare for by reading. Practising a section your employer does not use is wasted effort.

Check the dates yourself before you plan

We only publish an application window when the employer has published it and we can link to the source. Where a window is missing from a guide, that is deliberate: check the employer's own careers site rather than trust a date from a forum. Deadlines move, and rolling schemes close early once the intake fills.

Work in short, repeated sessions

Reasoning performance responds far better to several short sessions across a fortnight than to one long day of practice. Sit a section, read the review notes on the questions you got wrong, and come back to the same section two days later. The dashboard tracks which sections are lagging so you do not have to guess.

Where a guide covers a stage we cannot faithfully reproduce, it says so plainly rather than offering a practice version of it. Nothing on this site is affiliated with, endorsed by or provided by Sova Assessment or any employer named in these guides.

Not sure where to start?

If you already have an assessment invitation, open the employer section below and read its “what to expect” guide tonight, then book two practice sessions before your deadline. If you are still applying, start with the general Sova guides further down: they cover the question types, the timing model and the scoring approach that carry across every employer using the platform, so nothing you learn there is wasted when you find out which scheme you are sitting.

What you will not find here

No leaked questions, no recycled answer keys, and no invented statistics. Real questions are confidential, and any site offering them is selling you a risk to your application rather than an advantage. Our practice material is written from scratch to match the published format, and every acceptance rate, intake figure or salary we quote carries a link to the source and the date we last checked it.