Civil Service Situational Judgement Test

[ChiChiUg]

I have applied for some EO/AO roles with the CS. For the competency questions, I started off on a 3 but now I am comfortably on 5 after adequate preparations and online examples. My problem now is the Situational Judgement Test. The one of Effective, Ineffective or Counterproductive. I don't seem to understand the reasoning behind the correct answers. I have missed out on a number of applications because of low scores on SJT. Does anyone have any useful tips or online materials I can use to practise? Any response will be appreciated thanks.

Basically-
effective- made a positive difference
ineffective- made no difference
counterproductive- made things worse

Remember that you don’t have to have one of each for every question.

I find it helpful to read through the descriptions relevant behaviours from the job advert before I do it and try to keep those in mind, and pick options that marry up to those descriptions.

There’s also a degree of jobsworthiness about it. If a team are moaning about a project the effective answer is usually “talk to the team and explain why this project is so important, consider their ideas and get them on board” etc

Thanks for the tips, I appreciate. Sometimes the questions get very tricky and you are unsure if the actions might actually help or not. For example in this scenario, you are accessing some applications for funding and someone submitted after the deadline with the reasons that his daughter was rushed to the hospital on the day the applications closed and he was supposed to submit on that day but couldn't because of the situation. And one of the questions was, tell him that he should have submitted earlier before deadline or assign someone in his office to submit on his behalf. Now I am torn between being sympathetic with his situation or telling him off that he should have ensured his application was submitted on time. In this scenario is the advice effective or Ineffective.

The CS SJT is standard per grade rather than per job. I am a much higher grade and I always do really well on the test for my grade but really poorly for the EO/AO ones because they are testing different things. At my grade I'm expected to lead, make hard decisions and carry the can if it all goes wrong. At EO/AO that sort of behaviour is a nightmare - I'd be considered a maverick with no respect for the Management chain!

The way the tests are scores there is no right or wrong answers. It's scored by how many of the people they used for testing it out also picked that answer.

Some tips:

Treat each option in isolation. Eg you can mark all four options as ineffective rather than having one as effective, one as ineffective etc.

Remember not to bring any outside knowledge into the situation - even if you would do something different, you need to just consider the options in front of you using the information available to you.

Make sure you have read the behaviour dictionary and you understand what the desired behaviours are for the grade you're applying for - not the grade above!

Don't try and second guess the test by picking the "right" answer. But be aware that if you pick something that indicates you'd either moan along with the team or tell people to shut up and get on with it, those probably aren't the desires behaviours.

Thanks for the tips. I appreciate. Its now beginning to make sense to me. Its really frustrating when am good with the verbal reasoning, suitability statement, competency questions and then SJT disqualifies me.