Free 20-item drill at 27.3 s an item

Mechanical aptitude test: 20 drawn items, one clock

Twenty pictorial items — which hoist pulls easier, which way the belt drives the second wheel, where the water stands — answered by reading the drawing rather than by working anything out, and free with no account. You choose the tempo before you start, from three real formats: 27.3 seconds an item is the Bennett BMCT-II’s 55 items over 25 minutes, 30.0 is the Wiesen WTMA’s 60 over 30, and 33.3 is the Ramsay MAT’s 36 over 20. At the end you get a count, a median, and how many items that median would carry you through inside each of those three published limits — never a pass mark, because nobody outside the hiring company has one.

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20 drawn items
3 published tempos
No cut score invented

Twenty drawn items, one countdown, and every question answered by reading the picture rather than by working anything out. Pick the tempo first — each one is a real battery’s published item count divided by its published time limit, and that division is the only thing borrowed from it.

Seconds an item, from three published formats

Twenty items at 27.3 seconds gives you 9:06 on the clock.

What gets drawn

Block and tackle
Where to push
Meshed gears
Belt drive
Sharing a load
Standing water
Water under pressure

Each drawing is generated from a paper number and described in words for a screen reader, so the diagram is never the only route to the answer.

The three warm-up items explain themselves afterwards and reach none of the figures. Answer with keys 1 to 4 or the buttons; the report says how many arrived by tap.

How to run the drill

Pick a tempo, warm up without the clock, then take twenty items in a single pass.

Choose the seconds an item, not the minutes
The three buttons carry 27.3, 30.0 and 33.3 seconds an item. Those are not settings somebody invented for pacing practice: each one is a published item count divided by a published limit, so choosing one puts you under the same seconds-per-question pressure as the paper it came from. Twenty items at the Bennett figure is 9:05 on the clock, at the Wiesen figure 10:00 and at the Ramsay figure 11:07.
Take the three warm-ups if the format is new to you
The warm-up has no clock and explains itself: after each item it names the answer and the one rule the item turned on, then waits for you. Those three reach none of the figures at the end. Skip them with the second button and the countdown starts on item one — worth doing on a second visit, because the only thing the warm-up teaches is the interface.
Read the three-way reach table before the score
The headline count out of twenty is the least interesting number on the panel. Underneath it, your median seconds per item is divided into each of the three published limits, which tells you the thing you actually came to find out: whether you would run out of clock on a 55-item paper, and by how much. A run where accuracy was fine and the reach column was short is a different problem from one where both were short.

Technical specifications

Items	20 scored, dealt in rotation across 7 kinds of drawing so no kind lands twice in a row, plus 3 optional warm-up items excluded from every figure. Three or four options each, and one of them is sometimes 'the same either way'
The clock	One countdown across the paper at 27.3, 30.0 or 33.3 seconds an item — 9:05, 10:00 or 11:07 for twenty items. No per-item limit, no time added anywhere, and the item on screen at zero is recorded as void rather than wrong
Where the three tempos come from	Published format facts, divided: BMCT-II 55 items in 25 minutes (Pearson TalentLens, generated from a bank of over 300 questions), WTMA 60 items in 30 minutes, Ramsay MAT 36 items in 20 minutes. Nothing else about those papers is borrowed — the items here are our own
What gets drawn	Block and tackle with countable rope sections, wrench leverage, meshed gears drawn to scale by tooth count, open and crossed belt drives, a load shared between two carriers, water standing in joined containers of different widths, and jets from spouts at three depths
Answering	Keys 1 to 4 read by physical position, so the row works on QWERTY, AZERTY and Dvorak, and the numeric keypad works too. Every option is also an on-screen button for a phone, and each drawing carries a written description for a screen reader that contains the same information the picture does
What voids an item	An item the tab was away during — it goes back on the end of the paper and the countdown freezes while you are gone — the item on screen when the clock hits zero, and an answer that somehow arrives before the drawing has painted. Nothing is voided for being answered quickly: the 150 ms anticipation floor applies to a closing response window, and these items have none
Reported	Right out of the counted items with a 95% Wilson interval; items reached out of 20; median seconds on a counted item against the tempo's budget; the quickest counted answer; items you would reach inside each of the three published limits; right and asked per kind of drawing
What leaves the page	Nothing. The drill runs offline once loaded, the paper number and the five-figure result token are generated in the tab, and the copy button writes plain text to your own clipboard and nowhere else

Frequently asked questions

How do I find out which battery I am being sent?

The invitation email almost always names it, and that name is worth more than any practice site's guess. Look for a test name and a vendor in the same sentence — Pearson TalentLens for a Bennett, Criteria or Ramsay for a Wiesen, Ramsay Corporation for their own MAT — together with the number of questions and the time you are being given, which is usually stated because it is a scheduling fact. If the mail says only 'a mechanical aptitude assessment, about 25 minutes', that duration alone narrows it: three of the common papers run 20, 25 and 30 minutes.

What score do I need to pass?

Nobody outside the hiring company can tell you, and a site that prints a number is making it up. Two different things get called a pass: a cut score, which the employer sets for one job family against norm tables its vendor publishes only to licensed customers, and a rank, where everybody who applied is sorted and the top however-many go forward regardless of the absolute count. Under the second one there is no pass mark at all, only other candidates. This page therefore reports a raw count and a pace and stops, and the reach table is there because 'would I finish' is a question that can be answered honestly.

Are the real papers drawn or written?

Drawn, mostly, and that is why this page draws. The Bennett and the Wiesen both present simple line diagrams with a short question, and the Wiesen is deliberately written at a sixth-grade reading level so that reading ability does not contaminate a mechanical measurement. Some batteries mix in a written arithmetic or spatial section, and a few employers bolt a mechanical section onto a general cognitive test, which is a different paper again.

There is no arithmetic here at all. Is that right?

It is deliberate, and it matches the format more closely than a page full of calculations would. A pictorial mechanical item asks which of two arrangements needs less force, or which way something turns — a comparison, decided by reading the drawing correctly rather than by computing anything, which is why they can be answered in under thirty seconds. Where a real paper does put a number in front of you it is a simple ratio rather than a formula. If you want the arithmetic drilled explicitly, with the working shown after every answer, that is what the mechanical reasoning page next door does.

The 'same either way' option feels like a trick. Is it?

No, and it is the single most useful thing on this drill. A pictorial battery includes items where the two arrangements are genuinely equivalent, and candidates who have learned that the answer is always the longer lever or the bigger pulley get those wrong at a high rate. Two hoists with the same number of supporting rope sections need the same pull however differently they are drawn; two marks the same distance from a nut turn it equally hard. Reading the picture beats pattern-matching the question, and that is exactly what the item is for.

Why does the countdown stop when I switch tabs, when the real one will not?

Because a browser stops sending frames to a page nobody is looking at, so the alternative is worse than kind: the clock would count the four minutes you spent in your email as four minutes you spent studying a drawing of a gear train. The item you were on is voided, put back on the end of the paper and the clock resumes where it froze. The panel at the end says how many items went that way, so a run held together by tab switches is visible rather than hidden. An invigilated sitting does the opposite, and that difference is worth knowing before Thursday.

Do the real batteries cover electricity and heat as well?

Some of them do, and this page does not — say so out loud rather than let you assume otherwise. The published topic descriptions for the Bennett include electricity and hydraulics alongside pulleys, motion and balance, and the Wiesen's include basic electricity and the transfer of heat. Everything drawn here is mechanics and hydrostatics: gears, rope, levers, shared loads, standing water and pressure with depth. If your posting is an electrical maintenance role, treat this drill as covering part of the paper rather than all of it.

Who publishes these papers, and why none of them will tell you the pass mark

The format is older than almost anything else still sold for hiring. George K. Bennett published the first Mechanical Comprehension Test in 1940 through The Psychological Corporation; a full revision appeared in 1969 as Forms S and T, and the current BMCT-II arrived in 2014 with 55 items, a 25-minute limit and items drawn from a bank of more than 300 so that two candidates in the same room do not get the same paper. The Wiesen Test of Mechanical Aptitude runs 60 items in 30 minutes and is distributed by more than one vendor, which is why the disclaimer below names its owner generically rather than guessing. Ramsay Corporation’s own Mechanical Aptitude Test is the tightest of the three at 36 items in 20 minutes. Those six numbers are the whole of what this page borrows, and dividing them is where 27.3, 30.0 and 33.3 seconds come from.

Everything else about them is licensed, and the norm tables are the part that matters here. A vendor sells the paper together with a comparison group, and several of those groups are occupational rather than general — maintenance technicians, utility apprentices, machine operators — so the raw count that clears the bar for a warehouse posting and the one that clears it for an apprenticeship are different numbers against different populations. Some employers do not use a cut score at all and simply rank everyone who applied. That is why you will find a “good Bennett score” quoted confidently on a dozen preparation sites and nowhere in a publisher’s manual, and why this page prints no percentile, no band and no threshold. The one number that generalizes is the arithmetic of the clock, which is what the reach table gives you.

What actually costs people marks on the day is rarely the physics. It is reading a drawing at the pace of a text question, missing that the two rigs are reeved differently, or answering from a memorized rule instead of the picture in front of you. Twenty-seven seconds is enough time to count rope sections and not enough to check your answer twice, so the drill trains the reading rather than the recall. If the paper you are being sent is a general one rather than a mechanical one, the mixed aptitude set interleaves four strands at once, and the logical reasoning page covers the deduction items that usually sit beside a mechanical section. To understand the physics rather than practise spotting it, the mechanical reasoning page works every answer out in your own numbers with no clock running, and the verbal reasoning page is the other half of most industrial batteries.

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.

Item times here run from a few seconds to half a minute and are printed to a tenth of a second, so that floor is three orders of magnitude below anything this page reports. It is stated because the same clock is behind every figure on the site, and because the countdown repainting once a second sits inside the interval being measured.

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 the mechanical aptitude an employer is about to measure. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Pearson Education, Inc.. Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test 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.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the owner of Wiesen Test of Mechanical Aptitude. Wiesen Test of Mechanical Aptitude 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.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Ramsay Corporation. Ramsay Mechanical Aptitude Test 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 twenty answers are worked out

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 paper number in the footer of the result is what makes a run repeatable: it rebuilds the same twenty drawings, with the same rope counts and tooth counts, in the same order. It carries nothing about which options you picked. Reloading the page loses a finished run, which is the reason the copy button exists.