AbilityBenchFree 15-minute drill, three question strands
Fifty items, fifteen minutes, and the finish line almost nobody reaches
Criteria’s own candidate guide states four things about the CCAT that this drill copies exactly: 50 questions, 15 minutes, three kinds of question, and fewer than 1% of candidates answering all 50. Running the clock out is therefore the ordinary result, not a bad one, so the panel here leads with how many items you reached and which strand took the minutes — free, no account, and a live marker during the run showing the item you would have to be on to finish. The questions are generated fresh each run; none of them comes from the published bank.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 50 items in 15:00
- 18.0 s per item
- Live pace marker
- Skip allowed
Fifty items in fifteen minutes is 18 seconds each, and Criteria states in its own candidate preparation guide that fewer than 1% of candidates answer all fifty. Running out of paper is the ordinary outcome on this format, so the drill below is built around a pace marker: it shows where you would have to be right now to reach the last item, and where you actually are.
The same published guide states there is no penalty for a wrong answer, so on the real assessment a skip and a guess cost you exactly the same. That makes skipping a decision about seconds rather than about risk, which is why there is a skip control here and why the report counts skips separately instead of filing them as mistakes.
How to run the fifteen minutes
One clock, three strands, and a skip control that is part of the format.
Decide about the drawn figures before you start
The spatial strand is fifteen pictures with no text equivalent — a rotation described in words is a different puzzle, not the same one made accessible. The checkbox on the start screen turns them off and hands their slots to more verbal and math items, which keeps the fifty and the fifteen minutes intact and changes the strand structure. Whichever you choose, the panel at the end says which mix you ran.
Answer, or skip, and watch the marker rather than the clock
Number keys 1 to 5 or the buttons answer; S or the dashed button skips. Above the item sits a bar with your position on it and a second mark where the countdown says you would be at a flat 18 seconds an item. Being behind that mark is the normal state of this test — the useful question is whether the gap is opening or holding.
Read the share-of-the-clock column
The result splits reached, answered and correct by strand, and beside them the fraction of your fifteen minutes each strand consumed. A strand taking a third of the minutes for a third of the items is free; one taking half the minutes for a fifth of the items is where the run was decided, and that is a more actionable number than any total.
Technical specifications
| Format copied | 50 questions, 15 minutes, and three strands — verbal, math and logic, spatial reasoning — all four as stated in Criteria's published candidate preparation guide |
|---|---|
| Strand mix | 17 verbal, 18 math and logic, 15 spatial. That split is ours: Criteria names the three kinds and does not publish how many of each a form carries, so the page states its own mix rather than implying the publisher's |
| Pace | 18.0 seconds an item to reach question 50, shown live as a second marker on the progress bar rather than only in the summary |
| Item types | Unscramble a word and name its category; pick the most nearly opposite word; a missing reading behind a stated average; a rate held constant; a numerical analogy; a letter series; which drawn figure is the target turned rather than flipped; which drawn figure is not the same as the other four |
| Skipping | A dedicated control and the S key. A skip is recorded as reached and unanswered, never as an error, and the report gives the median seconds a skip cost you — because deciding to leave an item is not free |
| Accessibility route | The 15 drawn items can be switched off before the run. Nothing detects anything; the choice is offered to everyone on the start screen, and turning them off is reported rather than hidden |
| Reported | Items reached out of 50, answered and skipped separately, correct out of answered with a 95% Wilson interval, median seconds an item, and each strand's reached, correct, median and share of the clock |
| Not reported | No raw-to-scaled conversion, no percentile, no job-family range. Criteria supplies employers with a raw score and a percentile against its own norm group; that norm group is licensed, and this page will not approximate it |
Frequently asked questions
Why does almost nobody answer all fifty?
Because 18 seconds is the whole budget for an item, and the reading is inside it. Criteria states the figure itself — fewer than 1% of candidates answer all 50 — in the preparation guide it publishes for candidates, which makes it a fact about the format rather than a rumor about difficulty. An unscramble item where the letters do not resolve for ten seconds has already eaten its budget, and there are fifty of them.
Is skipping a good idea?
Skipping costs seconds and this page measures them rather than advising you. Criteria's guide states there is no penalty for a wrong answer, which means a blank and a guess are worth the same on the real thing and the only thing a skip buys is time. So the report gives the median seconds your skips actually took — usually far from zero, because deciding to leave an item means reading it first — and leaves the trade to you.
Why can the drawn figures be turned off?
Because a rotation item has no text version that is still the same item. Describing the shape in words turns a spatial task into a verbal one, and a screen reader given a bare figure label has nothing to work with. Rather than shipping fifteen unanswerable items or quietly detecting anything about the visitor, the choice sits on the start screen for everyone, the slots go to more verbal and math items, and the result panel says the strand structure was not the published one.
Is an unscrambling item really testing vocabulary?
Only partly, which is the point of the format. The letters have to resolve into a word and the word then has to be sorted into a category, so the item is two steps: a search over letter arrangements and a semantic classification. That is why it is a good time sink — the search step has no reliable method and either lands quickly or does not land at all, which makes it exactly the item type that separates a run that reaches item 40 from one that reaches item 25.
Why does my strand table not show 17, 18 and 15?
Because those are the counts on the form, and the table counts only what you reached. The three strands are interleaved evenly rather than blocked, so a run that stopped at item 31 saw roughly two-thirds of each — and if one strand is under-represented against that, you spent longer on it and got further behind while you did. The mix the form was built with is printed under the table for exactly that comparison.
Can I use a calculator?
Not on the real assessment: Criteria's guide states plainly that no calculators are allowed, which is why the math items here are built to be done in the head. The averages resolve to whole numbers, the rates hold constant, and the analogies use small factors. If an item here needs long division, that is a defect in the generator rather than a test of you.
How is the real one actually scored?
The employer receives a raw score — the number of questions answered correctly — together with a percentile against Criteria's own norm group, and this page produces neither. The raw count is easy and meaningless without the conversion; the conversion is the licensed part. What a raw count does and does not support is taken apart in full on the sibling page for this assessment under its long name, which also covers score ranges by job family and what a retake does.
What Criteria publishes about its own test, and what a browser can copy of it
Four numbers make this assessment what it is, and all four come from the publisher rather than from a prep vendor: fifty questions, fifteen minutes, three question types named as verbal, math and logic, and spatial reasoning, and fewer than one candidate in a hundred reaching the end. That last figure changes how everything else should be read. On a test where the median candidate never sees the last stretch of the form, a raw count is as much a measurement of pace as of anything else, and a practice run that reports only a percentage has quietly dropped the variable that dominates it. Hence the marker on the bar during the run, and the share-of-the-clock column after it.
Two more published rules shape how the drill behaves. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a blank and a guess score identically and the only currency a skip buys is seconds; and no calculator is allowed, which puts a hard ceiling on how much arithmetic an item can reasonably demand. Those two together explain the shape of a real form: short items with clean numbers, where the intended failure is running out of clock rather than running out of method. The math items here are generated to respect the second rule — averages that come out whole, rates that stay constant, factors under ten — and the skip control exists because of the first.
One more thing worth knowing before you take it. This assessment travels under two names, and the abbreviation and the full name are the same product: this page is the drill, and the page under the long name is the scoring half — raw against percentile, what a score range per job family means, what a recruiter is looking at, what a retake changes. They cross-link deliberately rather than repeating each other. For a shorter clock over a similar mix, the twelve-minute paper gives you 3.6 fewer seconds an item, and the Predictive Index practice runs fifty items in twelve minutes across three differently drawn types. If the process you are in also involves scenarios rather than problems, the situational judgement page explains why those have no right answers at all, and the work-inventory page covers the forced-choice questionnaires that often arrive in the same email.
A reaction time here is the interval between the frame that painted the stimulus and the timestamp the browser attached to your key, both read from the same monotonic clock. What neither can see is the display pipeline behind it, so on a 60 Hz screen roughly 16 ms of every figure below is the machine rather than you. That is the timing floor: two numbers closer together than that are the same number, and this page reports no precision it cannot support.
This is a measurement exercise, not a clinical assessment. It reports what you did on this page against a stated reference and nothing more — it cannot establish a condition that would qualify you for extra time on the real assessment. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Criteria Corp. CCAT is a trademark of its owner and is used here only to name the assessment this page prepares for. The questions on this page are our own: no part of the published test is reproduced, and a score here is not comparable to a score from the real instrument.
Where these fifty items are generated
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Your answers, your reaction times and your score are never uploaded, logged or kept — which is also why the test carries on working after you disconnect from the network, and why nothing here can be held back behind an email address.
The link to the scoring page is the one thing that leaves this tab, and only if you click it: it carries five numbers and the form number in the address bar, which is the fragment after the hash and is never sent to a server by any browser. No answer you gave and no per-item time is in it.