Fast Stream Feedback Report Explained: Online Tests and FSAC

So there are two different documents that candidates call “the feedback report”. One follows the online tests. The other follows the assessment centre, and of the pages we read, the assessment-centre guide is the only one that uses the words “feedback report”. The rest of this guide keeps them apart.

The page for the last campaign, as we saved it on 28 September 2026, put the warning more bluntly: it said that even candidates who receive very positive feedback may not progress to the next stage. The 2027 wording is shorter and says the same thing. The practical meaning is that the feedback describes how you answered, while the decision depends on how everyone else answered too. For the 2026 intake, GOV.UK recruitment data records 69,046 first-preference applications and 703 people recommended for appointment.

We hold no official description of the layout of the online-test feedback, and we have not seen an official sample. Descriptions on forums and coaching sites of bands, charts or percentile scores are not confirmed by any page we read, so we do not repeat them here.

The online-tests page has one “Test feedback” section for both tests together. It does not describe separate feedback for the Work-based scenarios and for the Case Study, so we do not either. What it does give is three things the feedback will do and one warning. The left column below is the official wording; the right column is our reading of it.

To place a comment, it helps to know what each test is officially said to measure. The feedback itself is not described test by test, so the last column is ours.

The last campaign’s page, in our copy saved on 28 September 2026, used one more word: it said all candidates would receive “detailed feedback” following the online tests. The page for 2027 entry does not use the word detailed, and neither page says how long the feedback is.

For comparison only: the standard Civil Service tests used for ordinary job adverts are described more fully on GOV.UK. There, your score is compared with a peer group to give a percentile, the Judgement Test comes with a feedback report that offers general suggestions on how to improve, and answers to specific questions are not given, to protect the security of the test. Those statements are about the Civil Service Jobs tests. The Fast Stream pages say none of this about the Fast Stream online tests, so do not assume a percentile will appear in yours.

That deadline is the one firm date attached to any Fast Stream feedback. If you reach the assessment centre and intend to apply again, or to use the report for other applications, save it when it arrives. Our suggestion is to do the same with the online-test feedback, since the page does not say how long that stays available.

To read the scores, recall how the day is built. The guide says the assessment centre includes 3 exercises, the Written Exercise, the Oral Briefing Exercise and the Personal Development Conversation, that the exercises are independent of each other, and that each is marked by a different assessor. So a low score on one exercise is one assessor’s view of one task, not a verdict on the whole day. The guide also says potential is assessed across four dimensions: Think, Relate, Adapt and Strive. It does not say whether the report is laid out by exercise only or by dimension as well.

The second part of this guide is about the test itself: what the Work-based scenarios test measures, seven tips tied to published behaviour descriptors, the one official example to rate, and the boundaries between neighbouring ratings. If your feedback pointed at the scenarios, start here. Worked answers to further scenarios are in our online tests guide.

The online-tests page gives one sentence: “This test measures interpersonal skills.” You watch short videos of work situations and rate how effective different actions would be. The page does not name any Civil Service behaviour for either online test. The assessment centre, by contrast, is assessed on a named framework of four dimensions (Think, Relate, Adapt and Strive), and the guide describes Relate as your interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. That framework is stated for the assessment centre, not for the online tests.

What GOV.UK does say, in Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours, is that behaviours can be assessed by asking “how you would behave in a given situation”, for example by using Situational Judgement Tests. The Work-based scenarios test is a test of that kind. So we use the published behaviour descriptors as the best official description of what good conduct at work looks like in the Civil Service. That link is our reading. It is not a statement that the test is scored against them.

GOV.UK defines nine behaviours; the other two are Seeing the big picture and Changing and improving. The seven above are the ones that most plainly involve other people or a piece of work in progress, which is what a work scenario shows. The choice of seven is ours.

GOV.UK prints examples of each behaviour at several grade levels. We quote the examples for “HEO and SEO grades or equivalent”, because the Civil Service Careers grades page lists graduate fast stream programmes as an entry route at Higher Executive Officer. The Fast Stream pages do not say which level, if any, the online tests are pitched at, so the choice of level is ours as well.

The first four rows are supported by the official worked example. The last three have no official item behind them, so they rest on the descriptors alone. Treat all seven as questions to ask of an action, not as rules that produce a rating.

This is the one Work-based scenarios item with published answers. Rate the four actions, then compare. If you have already done it on our online tests guide, do it again here and watch which way your misses go.

Most wrong ratings are one step from the key, on one side. Some candidates are generous and call Ineffective actions Partially effective; others are harsh and call Ineffective actions Counterproductive. Knowing your lean is more useful than a count of right answers, because it tells you which boundary to study. The definitions in the table are official; the test questions are ours.

The official example has no Partially effective action, so it cannot show you the upper boundary. That is the main limit of practising on one item, and the reason a larger set of rated actions is worth having.

Each scenario in the ProSyllabus practice set is tagged with one Civil Service behaviour. The tags are ours; they tell you what the scenario is mainly about, not how the Civil Service would mark it. The titles are listed so that you can see the spread before you start.

Counted by tag, that is four scenarios on Managing a Quality Service, two each on Making Effective Decisions, Communicating and Influencing, and Working Together, and one each on Delivering at Pace and Developing Self and Others. Every scenario has four actions to rate, 48 in all, with the reason for each rating. The set is text only and independent of the Civil Service.