Get your students to master Aptitude tests. Part (1 of 4)

Aptitude tests are a common feature in most of the recruitment processes. But how are aptitude skills interconnected to a student’s future role is a question in everyone’s minds. The answer is pretty simple. Aptitude skills test the problem-solving ability of a candidate. In real-life scenarios, an employee faces problems or challenges — problems and challenges like special requirements of a particular client, dealing with his or her co-workers, innovating a new system etc. But before an employee jumps into applying his subject/technical knowledge, it is very important for him or her to understand the problem and know what skills to apply first. Hence, problem-solving skills are one of the most prominent skills required by an employee. And nothing tests problem-solving skills as effectively and efficiently as aptitude tests.

So, aptitude tests are going to be the perennial components of any recruitment process. Sure, there would be extra components like programming tests but they would not replace aptitude tests.

Hence, it becomes very important to train your students on aptitude tests and train them in the right way. We have typically observed some mistakes when students prepare by themselves or when the training is not done right.

1. Students prepare for the aptitude exams from famous books like R.S.Aggarwal. One common insight we have drawn from this is that students generally concentrate only on topics that they are interested in or find easy, and ignore or tread lightly on the topics they find tougher.

Every year FACE conducts free & paid mock tests in various colleges across India. We did an analysis of the average scores achieved by about 4000 students (with & without training) in the Quantitative aptitude section. Below is the analysis.

Note: All the scores are scaled to a maximum of 30 marks. That means if a student scores 60 out of 100, on this chart, he or she will score 18.

While it is understandable that the students with training are scoring more, the startling fact lies in the distribution of the scores. If you observe, students without training are doing fairly average in topics like Profit & Loss, Time, Speed & Distance(TSD), Time & Work (T&W). However, they lag behind in a lot of other topics like Permutation, Numbers, Geometry, Probability etc. which is the problem. We can clearly conclude that the students are doing well only in the topics of their interest (TSD, T&W are favorite topics for most of the students.) and are not doing well in others. During selection process, all topics are given more or less equal weightage. Hence, they are at a disadvantage compared to others.

What are the other common mistakes that can happen if the aptitude training is not done right? Read that in our next article of FACE Pulse.

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