The Last Three Weeks Before Your Reasoning Tests

If you found this page with two months in hand, close it and use the 8-week plan instead — it is a better use of the time you have. This one is for the other case: the AD5 reasoning tests are expected from October–November 2026, your invitation has landed or is about to, and what is left is weeks, not months. That is a different problem. Three weeks is too short to rebuild a skill and quite long enough to squander, and the difference between those two outcomes is almost entirely about what you decide not to do.

Start from the scoring, because it is counter-intuitive

Part 1 of this competition is three tests sat in a single session on one day:

Read the right-hand column again, because it contains the only strategic decision you need to make. To reach Part 2 you need 10/20 in verbal and 10/20 combined across numerical and abstract. Beyond those thresholds, numerical and abstract stop paying. A candidate who scores 19/20 on the combined hurdle and one who scores 10/20 arrive at Part 2 in exactly the same position.

That single fact should reallocate your remaining hours. The instinct in the last weeks is to shore up your weakest test. If your weakest test is abstract reasoning, that instinct is wrong past the point where you can reliably clear the combined hurdle.

Week 1: diagnose honestly, then triage

Do not start by studying. Start by finding out where you are, under conditions close to the real thing: full timed sets, no pauses, no paper on the desk (more on that below), three tests back to back in the same session so you feel the fatigue curve.

Then sort yourself into one of three cases:

Build an error log from that first diagnostic and keep it for the whole three weeks. Not a list of scores — a list of reasons. “Chose an option that was true but not stated in the passage.” “Ran out of time and guessed the last three.” “Misread a percentage as a percentage-point change.” Patterns show up fast, and in three weeks fixing recurring errors beats learning new technique.

The constraint most people practise wrong

EPSO’s tests are sat at home under remote proctoring, and the desk policy is exhaustive: laptop and charger, mouse and keyboard, one external display, your ID, a mousepad, a label-free drink, two plain tissues. Writing materials, paper, books and notes are forbidden, and taking handwritten notes during the test can invalidate your session.

If you have been doing numerical practice with a notepad beside you, you have been rehearsing a version of the exam that does not exist. TAO gives you an on-screen calculator and an on-screen scratchpad instead, plus a highlighter, a line reader and an answer-elimination tool. They work perfectly well and they are slower than a pencil until they are familiar.

So the first change to make this week costs nothing: clear your desk for every practice session from now on. Mental arithmetic or the on-screen calculator, nothing written down. Expect your numerical times to get worse for a few days. That is the point — better to absorb that cost now than on the day.

The full set of rules, the check-in sequence and the twelve things that terminate a test automatically are in the test-day guide. Read it once this week, not on the morning.

Week 2: the highest-yield verbal work

Twenty questions in thirty-five minutes is 1 minute 45 seconds per question, including reading the passage. That is the real constraint, and most lost marks in verbal are lost to it rather than to comprehension. Three things move the number in a fortnight:

• Answer the question that was asked. EPSO verbal items are judged strictly against the passage. The classic wrong answer is a statement that is true in the world, plausible to an informed reader, and simply not supported by the text in front of you. Train the reflex of asking “where, in these lines, is that stated?” before selecting.
• Learn the qualifiers. May and must, all and most, shall and should. EU administrative prose is written to be precise about obligation and scope, and the distractors exploit exactly those words. If you are sitting in your second language, this is where your marks are — see verbal reasoning in your second language.
• Practise abandoning a question. There is no negative marking. A question you cannot resolve in under two minutes is costing you the two easy questions further down the paper. Flag it, guess, move, come back if the clock allows. TAO has a bookmark and an overview panel precisely for this.

Alongside that, keep numerical and abstract on maintenance: two or three short timed sets a week each. Enough that no format is a surprise; not enough to eat into the ranking test.

Week 3: taper, do not cram

The last week is where most well-prepared candidates lose ground, because the temptation is to work hardest when the exam is closest. Reverse it.

Two specific items belong in that logistics day, because they are the ones EPSO will not rescue you from. The mandatory technical prerequisite check can only be run once per competition and cannot be repeated — run it on the exact machine, peripherals and room you will use, and do it well before the deadline in your invitation letter. And be aware that a whole category of test-day complaints do not automatically earn a retest: a corporate laptop without administrator rights, an improper peripheral setup, a late login, a laptop that ran out of battery because it was not plugged in, a missing valid ID. Every one of those is a fifteen-minute fix the week before and an unrecoverable loss on the day.

What three weeks cannot do — and what it can

Be realistic about the ceiling. Three weeks will not turn a candidate who reads slowly in their first language into a fast one, and it will not manufacture numerical fluency that was never there. What it reliably does is narrower and still valuable:

• It removes unforced errors — misread qualifiers, questions abandoned too late, options chosen because they sounded institutionally correct.
• It fixes pacing, which is worth several marks on its own in a 35-minute paper.
• It eliminates format shock, so the first ten minutes of the real test are not spent adjusting to an interface.
• It makes the proctoring conditions ordinary rather than stressful.

In a competition of roughly 174,727 candidates for about 1,490 places on the reserve list, marks at the margin are the whole game — and the marks available at the margin in three weeks are almost all in verbal reasoning. Protect the hurdles, then spend everything else there.

One last piece of housekeeping that has nothing to do with revision and can end your competition anyway: your supporting documents are due by 7 October 2026, midday Brussels time. If that is not already done, it outranks every hour of practice in this article — see the documents deadline guide.

Frequently asked questions