Civil Service Judgement Test Score: What Your Percentile Means

The guidance for the test says: “After taking the test, you will receive your score and automatically-generated feedback. This will be available from your application centre in Civil Service Jobs. For security reasons, we cannot provide feedback on answers to specific questions.”

The general online-tests page adds a little more about the feedback: “For the Judgment Test and Styles Assessment you will receive a feedback report to help you understand your test performance. This also provides general suggestions about how to improve further.” It also explains why you never see the answers: “You won’t be given answers to specific test questions, to avoid compromising the security of the test. If we shared test answers, this would give an unfair advantage to anyone who has them.”

That is the whole official description. No sample report is published on the pages we read, so we cannot tell you its headings, whether it breaks your result down by behaviour, or how long it is. If your report shows something this guide does not mention, trust the report.

The same reading as a table. The middle column applies the official definition to each number; the last column is our subtraction from it.

The two official pages describe the comparison group in different words. The CSJT page says your score “is compared to a representative group of applicants who have also taken the test”. The online-tests page says responses are compared “with the results of a peer group who took the same test”. We print both because they are not identical, and neither says more.

What is not stated: how large the group is, when its members took the test, whether there is a separate group for each grade, and how often it is updated. One clue points to a change over time without explaining it. The page on the Verbal and Numerical tests says a banked score for those tests expires when “a new score benchmark is applied to the test”. That sentence is about other tests, and the CSJT page has no equivalent, so we do not draw a conclusion about the CSJT from it.

The scenarios themselves depend on the job level: “You will only be presented with scenarios that are relevant to the job level you have applied for.” The page does not say whether the comparison group is matched to that level too.

The official pages describe five uses, and it helps to see them together.

The guidance also explains why tests are used at all. It says they can “allow candidates to demonstrate their strengths”, “provide recruiters with objective assessments against relevant criteria” and “identify where candidates could develop their skills”, and that when used appropriately “there is no advantage to having additional educational qualifications or work experience” and “they can predict candidate performance in later selection stages”.

Our reading: the score is a gate, not a ranking that follows you through the rest of the process. Nothing on the pages we read says the percentile is added to an interview score or used to order candidates at the final stage. Equally, nothing says it is not. Each department runs its own campaign, and the job advert and the messages in your application centre are the authority for a particular vacancy.

Some Civil Service tests have “banked scores”: pass once, and the score is reused for later applications for a period. The official pages are not the same for every test, and the CSJT page is silent on the point.

We do not conclude from that silence that a CSJT pass is never reused, or that it is. The Verbal and Numerical page says that when you apply for a job needing a test, “Civil Service Jobs will check if you have an applicable banked test score”, and that if you do, “you won’t be invited to the test”. In practice, then, the system tells you: if you are invited to take the CSJT, you need to take it.

On data, the CSJT page says: “Personal information is held securely in Civil Service Jobs - the test supplier cannot see it, and will only know your name if you choose to share it.” And: “Your information will only be used to support your job application, and evaluate test effectiveness.” It links to the Civil Service Jobs privacy notice for the detail.

The guidance separates questions about the test from questions about the job. For the test: “For further support, contact your recruitment team - their email address will be in your application centre.” For the vacancy: “Questions about the advertised job should be directed to the contact on the job advert.” It also asks that queries and help requests are sent “at least two working days before the test deadline, to ensure a response”. If a disability affected how you took the test, the reasonable-adjustments guide for online tests tells you to contact the recruiter; one of its case studies describes a recruiter resetting the Judgement Test for a candidate who became unwell and was timed out.