What is a Spatial Reasoning Test?
Aptitude and psychometric tests are one of the most important aspects of getting a job nowadays. Employers stress on psychometric tests to determine your skills, personality, and traits in order to see if you fit the requirement that they desire.
Spatial reasoning tests are special tests that assess your ability to think and manipulate two and three-dimensional figures. It is a special part of reasoning ability that is very often put to use by employers as a part of the psychometric process to test various skills pertaining to the job you are doing or applying for.
How does the Spatial Reasoning Test work?
The test usually asks you about the manipulation of three-dimensional figures such as cubes and spheres mentally without touching anything. As the name suggests, these types of tests assess your spatial reasoning ability. Spatial reasoning can be defined as a test where your orientation, manipulation and pattern recognition skills are put to test.
Popular spatial reasoning tests include-
- Mirror Images
- Perspectives
- Spatial reasoning cubes
- Organizing two dimensional and three-dimensional shapes
Ability tests are a common mode of evaluating present as well as prospective employees.
Industries that use Spatial Reasoning Test
As Spatial Reasoning Test tests your ability to manipulate and sort data in the two and three-dimensional planes, technical or design related jobs make extensive use of them. Jobs in sectors such as architecture, design, astronomy, economic forecasting are some of the many sectors that make use of Spatial Reasoning Tests. Apart from the sectors mentioned above, these reasoning tests are also used in selecting the right candidate for the military where you have to mentally map and manipulate objects. Thus, the Spatial Reasoning Test has a plethora of uses spread throughout various job sectors.
Jobs that use Spatial Reasoning Test for evaluating the candidates
Continuing from the section above, various job roles such as an architecture, an astronomer, parts of sciences where you have to analyze and assess three-dimensional figures, all use spatial reasoning tests for their day to day working.
Spatial Reasoning ability tests are also used in many areas of mathematics and natural sciences.
How difficult is the Spatial Reasoning Test?
As we are not hard-wired to directly manipulate and assess two and three-dimensional figures, spatial reasoning tests may be a bit harder to wrap your head around. Specially, the manipulation, analysis and assessments of three-dimensional figures. But with practice, comes perfection and it is advisable to practice as many spatial reasoning tests as possible before the main examination. With every set that you practice you are essentially training your brain to analyze patterns and organize the shapes to arrive at the correct answer.
How important is the Spatial Reasoning Test for your evaluation?
Spatial Reasoning tests are a part of the evaluation process and you have to face the exam in order to obtain a better overall score than your competitors. The Spatial Reasoning Test is generally a part of the Psychometric Test which the evaluating company conducts.
Thus Spatial Reasoning should not be left out and must be prepared along with various other assessment tests. These kinds of tests are mostly conducted online nowadays but you should know beforehand whether the exam that you are going to give will be online or offline. This will help you get familiar with the pattern of the test and help you boost your scores tremendously.
What kind of knowledge is required to pass the Spatial Reasoning Test?
Spatial Reasoning tests require you to arrange and manipulate pictures which can either represent three-dimensional objects or two dimensional objects. Exams like these require no special knowledge except the things that the exam tries to assess. Therefore, it is best for you to practice the kind of problems that commonly appear in Spatial Reasoning Tests.
Some of the common problems that make their way into such tests are-
- Matching two dimensional shapes
- Combining shapes
- Maps
- Mirror Images
- Two and three-dimensional solids
Spatial Reasoning Test practice tips-
There are precisely three steps that you must take to properly solve each Spatial Reasoning question correctly-
Analyze the building blocks
Random guessing never works and you must try to take a systematic approach to solving every question. Investigate the basic given features of the question provided. Things like the number of sides of the objects, the color of the objects and the elements inside the objects (if any) help you a lot in arriving at the conclusion.
Look for patterns and rules
Look for a common pattern in all the figures of the question given. If you identify the pattern and find it common throughout the whole sequence, then chances are that you have already answered the question correctly. Identifying the rules at the beginning gives you a significant edge over other candidates.
Elimination
This is one of the most popular methods of arriving at the answer and helps most of the time. Elimination helps you eliminate all the improbable answers and limits your options to two or three. Then you can make use of the steps mentioned above to arrive at the answer.
To sum things up
Thus, Spatial Reasoning job practice test helps you prepare for the exam and measures your performance in stressful situations so that you are able to ace the real exam without much difficulty. Spatial reasoning career practice exams can be found on many websites and implementing the three rules mentioned above, you can easily arrive at the correct answer, provided you have enough practice and familiarize yourself with the nuances of the subject thoroughly.