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The CAT4, explained, and free non-verbal practice
The CAT4 is a cognitive abilities test. British curriculum schools across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah use it for admissions, for setting and streaming, and as a baseline they report against. Children sitting it for Year 7 entry to a selective school usually take it in Year 5 or Year 6.
Practise non-verbal reasoning freeThe four parts
A CAT4 has four batteries. It is not a test of what a child has been taught, which is the point of it: a school uses it to see potential that a maths book might be hiding.
- Verbal reasoning
Reasoning with words. Word relationships and verbal classification.
- Non-verbal reasoningWhat our free test covers
Reasoning about shapes and patterns, with no reading involved.
- Quantitative reasoning
Reasoning with numbers, which is not the same thing as being good at arithmetic.
- Spatial ability
Picturing shapes moving, turning and folding.
Our free test covers the non-verbal battery only. We would rather do one part properly than four badly, and non-verbal is the part that generates cleanly enough for us to promise every question has exactly one defensible answer.
What an SAS score of 100 or 115 actually means
A CAT4 report gives a Standard Age Score, or SAS. It is built so that the average child of that age scores 100, and so that about two thirds of children fall between 85 and 115. It is age-adjusted, which is why a child born in August is not penalised against one born in September.
So an SAS is not a mark out of 200 and not a percentage. It is a position: 115 means well above the average for children the same age, 100 means right about average, 85 means well below. It only means that because GL first gave the test to a large, carefully chosen national sample. The sample is the whole reason the number says anything.
Which is why our test does not give you one. We have no such sample. Any SAS-shaped number from a free online test, ours or anyone else's, is invented. What we give you instead is how many of each kind of puzzle your child got right, the hardest level they solved, and how long they took.
What our test is, honestly
- It is: 24 adaptive non-verbal reasoning puzzles of the same four kinds a CAT4 non-verbal battery uses, free, and about twelve minutes.
- It is not: a CAT4, a mock CAT4, or a prediction of one. It is not made by GL Assessment, it is not endorsed by them, and nothing it tells you will decide an admissions outcome.
- It is useful for: finding out whether this kind of puzzle is unfamiliar to your child, which is worth knowing before test day. Most of the gap on a first sitting is unfamiliarity, not ability.
A non-verbal question, so you can see
This is a matrix: one rule across the rows, another down the columns, and the missing square obeys both.
Which shape fills the empty square?
The choices
- Answer
- 2
- 3
- 4
Should you coach for a CAT4?
Schools use the CAT4 precisely because it is meant to be hard to coach. What practice genuinely fixes is familiarity: a child who has never seen a matrix puzzle loses time working out what is being asked, and time is half of what these tests measure. An hour of exposure is worth a lot. Ten hours of drilling is not, and it makes the result less useful to the school that has to teach your child.