2020 Executive Officer Civil Service

floorpie

fionnr01 wrote: »

How do you mean 40 minutes to spare?

Govannan wrote: »

Yeah I think this person has the meaning of "time to spare" backwards!

They finished 40 minutes before the deadline (3pm)

Scatterbrain

I think I submitted mine just past the deadline. Life stuff got chaotic, and meant that I wound up scrambling to sit the tests at the very last minute. I could have almost gotten it in on time, but then was tripped up by the same question Floorpie mentioned above about the effective tax. Spent way too long blankly staring at that one, before it finally clicked. Sadly, when I looked up from it I only had seconds left; I tried to guess maybe four answers to blast through them, but then my time ran out and I quickly answered the remaining few while processing my own folly-wrought downfall. :P It was going really well up until the moment it-... wasn't...! Wish we could have had the option to review our answers, or move on and come back to complete them at the end.
Ah well. So it goes! Best of luck, all!

messy tessy

CivilCybil wrote: »

My numerical questions were about car insurance and then about company cars.
There was one question asking about average mileage which sounds simple (as in, average is add the total mileage and divide by the number of cars) but no matter what way I worked it out my answer came nowhere near the provided answers.

Oh well, will just have to wait and see.

I got this one too, I did it three times as I *obviously* know how to work it out. None of the answers were even close to what I got. Very frustrating.

Anyway it's done now. Would be very surprised if I got through it.

Rikand

Nekarsulm wrote: »

Didn't get the container questions, got two different sets of graphs concerning insurance costs, and a set about shop rental costs in London, Paris, New York and Berlin.

We live out in the country, and half way through the test a van drove uptown thehouse and guy got out and started ringing the doorbell. I couldn't move, then he came to the window looked straight at me and started knocking.
I had to ignore him, couldn't even look towards him.
I bet he thought I was a brazen **** !

He probably just thinks you're deaf

fionnr01

MrsBean wrote: »

There are several ooms throughout the process.
Likely once these tests are complete people who passed will be given an oom and brought to next stage or stages. You may receive ooms with those stages too and pas will bring X amount forward at a time.

Eventually if you successfully complete interview stage you will be placed on a panel and given an oom then too. You will be assigned as your oom number comes up.

Thanks. Wow so still a long way to go, its hard to imagine they will be placing people from this competition by November!! as said on q&a video on public jobs fb page at application stage. Is there any point practicing for e-tray til we get these results? Are some eliminated at this stage? I

Rikand

Jovetic wrote: »

40 mins on numerical. You won't be going any further

I could have spent longer but made sure to do it in less than 15 mins

Better to do it quickly and wrong than slowly and right ?

You'll have a lot of the same people coming back to you time and time again because you gave them the wrong hastily thrown together misinformation

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Rikand wrote: »

Better to do it quickly and wrong than slowly and right ?

You'll have a lot of the same people coming back to you time and time again because you gave them the wrong hastily thrown together misinformation

Yeah. It said on the info that the tests were timed but there was no limit on it. I can't see the times being relevant unless it comes down to a choice between two people much further down the line and they scored the exact same points on every stage up to that point. Even then, interviewing them both would probably be a more likely outcome than checking the times.

Govannan

floorpie wrote: »

They finished 40 minutes before the deadline (3pm)

Oh, now I'm the one who has it backwards!

floorpie

Rikand wrote: »

Better to do it quickly and wrong than slowly and right ?

You'll have a lot of the same people coming back to you time and time again because you gave them the wrong hastily thrown together misinformation

This. Plus:

1) they didn't say it would take 15 minutes, they said "approximately 15 minutes"
2) they never gave weightings for timing versus accuracy, and specifically didn't say whether time was more important
3) Lastly, speculation, but they specified that if you delayed in answering a question because e.g. you were accidentally logged out, the time you spent logging back in would only affect your time for the question you're currently on. In other words, I don't think it considers total time spent, but rather time per question. I.e., being stumped on one question for even 30 minutes may not be an issue, if you complete the rest in a good time.

I'd guess that the weightings will be derived from how people do on average in each dimension. In other words, if the average completion time is 25 minutes, then 30 minutes likely wont be penalised heavily. That's just a guess though.

EarlyStorms

They'll take into account the amount of questions you got right, the difficulty level of those questions and how long it took you to answer the questions. You wont be out for taking a bit longer than recommended.

Dublintigger

Marmo1986 wrote: »

Can’t stand the e tray, think it’s a pointless exercise. I got 53 the last time, pass makenwas 55 then. It was straight after the interview which I passed, eliminated because of e tray ��

I was the same - I missed the etray by 2 points and aced everything else.....

Is there a practice etray anywhere - I had a look on SOVA but couldnt see anything remotely like the etray.

I wonder if we will have the same etray scenario or something totally left field??

Govannan

I had a question asking how much an employee would need to contribute to tax on a car given that the employer contributes X amount. There was a formula included on the page but the formula made absolutely no sense to me and produced astronomically high figures any way I tried to work it, so I just guessed that one and moved on.

MrKingsley

Govannan wrote: »

I had a question asking how much an employee would need to contribute to tax on a car given that the employer contributes X amount. There was a formula included on the page but the formula made absolutely no sense to me and produced astronomically high figures any way I tried to work it, so I just guessed that one and moved on.

Yeah I think I had the same question. It was an absolute doozy. Broke out an algebra equation for it and everything and go no where. That that was coin toss answer for me

Quadrivium

messy tessy wrote: »

I got this one too, I did it three times as I *obviously* know how to work it out. None of the answers were even close to what I got. Very frustrating.

Anyway it's done now. Would be very surprised if I got through it.

I got the same one, the average mileage didn't work out no matter what I done.
I can only assume the answers provided by sova were all wrong.
There were a few others where the graphs didn't provide adequate or relevant information to provide an answer, on those I just guessed.

Also, did anyone else notice on the final screen that the time given was one hour behind?

Marmo1986

Dublintigger wrote: »

I was the same - I missed the etray by 2 points and aced everything else.....

Is there a practice etray anywhere - I had a look on SOVA but couldnt see anything remotely like the etray.

I wonder if we will have the same etray scenario or something totally left field??

I think it’ll be a similar scenario to the last one, I was hoping they’d remove it from this campaign because of Covid! It’s frustrating to pass everything and fail because of it, hard one to practise for I think compared to numerical and verbal aptitude tests. I will have a look for some practice E test tests but no point really unless I pass this stage

Quadrivium

Scatterbrain wrote: »

I think I submitted mine just past the deadline. Life stuff got chaotic, and meant that I wound up scrambling to sit the tests at the very last minute. I could have almost gotten it in on time, but then was tripped up by the same question Floorpie mentioned above about the effective tax. Spent way too long blankly staring at that one, before it finally clicked. Sadly, when I looked up from it I only had seconds left; I tried to guess maybe four answers to blast through them, but then my time ran out and I quickly answered the remaining few while processing my own folly-wrought downfall. :P It was going really well up until the moment it-... wasn't...! Wish we could have had the option to review our answers, or move on and come back to complete them at the end.
Ah well. So it goes! Best of luck, all!

Did the screen timeout or did your test submit past the time? Perhaps it will be accepted once you started before 3pm

floorpie

CivilCybil wrote: »

My numerical questions were about car insurance and then about company cars.
There was one question asking about average mileage which sounds simple (as in, average is add the total mileage and divide by the number of cars) but no matter what way I worked it out my answer came nowhere near the provided answers.

Oh well, will just have to wait and see.

floorpie wrote: »

This is one of the questions I refer to above (https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=114706292&postcount=1434). The answer here was a weighted average, i.e. you have to multiply the number of each model by the mileage per car, then divide by the total number of cars across all models. This would be more obvious if there were 5000 of one model of car, obviously then the total average mileage for all cars would be heavily weighted by the high number of that single model.

The method you did would be more correct if there were just one of each model.

There were never questions like this on previous tests, that I recall, and there were more involved weighted averages in later questions.

messy tessy wrote: »

I got this one too, I did it three times as I *obviously* know how to work it out. None of the answers were even close to what I got. Very frustrating.

Anyway it's done now. Would be very surprised if I got through it.

Quadrivium wrote: »

I got the same one, the average mileage didn't work out no matter what I done.
I can only assume the answers provided by sova were all wrong.
There were a few others where the graphs didn't provide adequate or relevant information to provide an answer, on those I just guessed.

Also, did anyone else notice on the final screen that the time given was one hour behind?

The answer was a weighted average, not an average. The options they gave were correct

Scatterbrain

Quadrivium wrote: »

Did the screen timeout or did your test submit past the time? Perhaps it will be accepted once you started before 3pm

It didn't timeout at all, I just submitted past the time, but the 'submission time' on the test website seemed to be an hour behind, so it said that I finished at 2.03 or so, instead of 3.03. Hopefully they might accept it (in which case I'll be kicking myself for rushing and picking certain answers at random)! Fingers crossed.

Quadrivium

floorpie wrote: »

The answer was a weighted average, not an average. The options they gave were correct

Cheers for that although I don't remember if it stated "weighted average" perhaps it did. It is what it is.

Quadrivium

Scatterbrain wrote: »

It didn't timeout at all, I just submitted past the time, but the 'submission time' on the test website seemed to be an hour behind, so it said that I finished at 2.03 or so, instead of 3.03. Hopefully they might accept it (in which case I'll be kicking myself for rushing and picking certain answers at random)! Fingers crossed.

I'm in the same boat due to the hardware on the sova website not working on my laptop regardless of which browser I used which meant I had to scramble to get a loan of a laptop, what will be, will be. The time on mine was an hour behind too.

floorpie

Quadrivium wrote: »

Cheers for that although I don't remember if it stated "weighted average" perhaps it did. It is what it is.

No it didn't state it. It's the first EO test I recall this type of question being on, although they're common on SOVA tests as used by consultancy companies (Bain etc). If I knew that I'd be doing a consultancy-level aptitude test for an EO position in CS I would've just applied to the consultancies

newbie18892

Dublintigger wrote: »

Did you do the Situational Judgement Test (SJT) on SOVA?

I did that one too but didn't find it very useful. I couldn't see anywhere to get feedback on the questions.

CivilCybil

It definitely didn't say weighted average in the question.
There were a few where I went to click on "can't say" and realised it wasn't an option.
And I did verbal and numerical in 15 minutes each. Possibly should have spent longer.

Although for the last EO test I remember sitting the etray section and flying through it (very similar to work I currently do) after about 10 minutes it ended, I was finished. Had to sit there for the rest of the session while everyone else was typing away. I really thought I'd fail it but I actually scored really high on it.
It can be very hard to gauge how you did on these because it also depends on how others did.


Word of caution to everyone too, I was on the last panel. Batch 1:1. Just within the top ten. And was never placed. It happens. Second time lucky I hope.

Furious-Red

Govannan wrote: »

I had a question asking how much an employee would need to contribute to tax on a car given that the employer contributes X amount. There was a formula included on the page but the formula made absolutely no sense to me and produced astronomically high figures any way I tried to work it, so I just guessed that one and moved on.

MrKingsley wrote: »

Yeah I think I had the same question. It was an absolute doozy. Broke out an algebra equation for it and everything and go no where. That that was coin toss answer for me

Yea i got that question too, i tried using the answers that were giving to see if i could work backwards :pac::pac: . Ended up guessing the answer in the end

newbie18892

Furious-Red wrote: »

Yea i got that question too, i tried using the answers that were giving to see if i could work backwards :pac::pac: . Ended up guessing the answer in the end

I got that question too. I tried for ages and couldn't get it so I worked back from the answers and one worked lol. Hope it's right.

Birneybau

CivilCybil wrote: »

My numerical questions were about car insurance and then about company cars.
There was one question asking about average mileage which sounds simple (as in, average is add the total mileage and divide by the number of cars) but no matter what way I worked it out my answer came nowhere near the provided answers.

Oh well, will just have to wait and see.

Got exact same question. Did same formula as yourself, and no answers matched it.

Yes, before anyone replies, I see now it was weighted average but they left that very vague altogether.

floorpie

Birneybau wrote: »

Yes, before anyone replies, I see now it was weighted average but they left that very vague altogether.

Personally I thought every one of the questions was similarly vague, even for more simple calculations.

The "cost of interviewers per day" one was so awful even though it was just addition/multiplication.

IMO they're not appropriate questions for a general intake of EOs.

owen28

Govannan wrote: »

I had a question asking how much an employee would need to contribute to tax on a car given that the employer contributes X amount. There was a formula included on the page but the formula made absolutely no sense to me and produced astronomically high figures any way I tried to work it, so I just guessed that one and moved on.

I got this question also. I couldn't figure out as I too got large figures. I guessed also. It said also that the employee did not contribute to the car. Because of this the equation given was not straight forward. Anyway it seems that the majority of people are all saying the same thing about the test and that the numerical was awful. We will just have to wait and see. Best of luck all.

floorpie

owen28 wrote: »

It said also that the employee did not contribute to the car. Because of this the equation given was not straight forward.

That was the annoying trick I believe. Because they didn't contribute anything, you could ignore half the equation (as it was multiplied by zero). I wasted so much time on this.

fionnr01

owen28 wrote: »

I got this question also. I couldn't figure out as I too got large figures. I guessed also. It said also that the employee did not contribute to the car. Because of this the equation given was not straight forward. Anyway it seems that the majority of people are all saying the same thing about the test and that the numerical was awful. We will just have to wait and see. Best of luck all.

I got this question too... pure guess... anyone get the graph about cities that completed company training, london Cardiff etc, it was a weighted sideways graph... im sure not the technical term but it was cuck!!