Group Bourdon Test Practice: Free Online Sheets and a 14-Day Plan

For Group Bourdon test practice, our advice is short, timed sheets: mark every target group, count your missed and wrong marks separately, and keep accuracy ahead of speed. Start with level 1 of our concentration trainer below, free and with no sign-in. Then work through the approved practice materials your train company sends at least a week before your assessment.

ProSyllabus is an independent study site. It is not part of RSSB, the Office of Rail and Road, The OPC or any train company, and nothing here is official test material.

The Group Bourdon is one of the two attention tests in RSSB's RIS-3751-TOM, Psychometric Assessment in Train Driver Selection, the rail industry standard for train drivers on Great Britain's mainline railway. RSSB's FAQ lists it as the "Paper Group Bourdon", next to the Test of Everyday Attention-Occupational (TEA-Occ). The OPC, one of the registered assessment centres, counts it among the "core tests" that are "universal to all companies" and "that you must pass". Translink, in Northern Ireland, which says its own process also follows RIS-3751-TOM, lists it as "Paper & pencil", competency assessed "Attention".

What none of these documents gives is the layout: they do not say what the items look like, how many there are or how long each part lasts. Candidates describe it on forums. One reply in a 2017 traindriver.org forum thread (forum-reported, not checked against any official source) puts it as five sheets of boxes of dots, sometimes letters, with each box of four dots to be circled and two minutes a sheet. Treat any such figure as one forum poster's account. The approved practice materials your train company sends are what RSSB says will familiarise you with what to expect.

That gap shapes how to practise. You cannot rehearse an official sheet that none of the sources we read publishes, so practise the ability the standard names, attention: a steady scan, a check before every mark, and the same accuracy on the last sheet as on the first. For every test in the standard, see our guide to all the UK train driver psychometric tests.

Our trainer uses one simple format: a grid of boxes, each holding a group of dots, and you mark every box with exactly four dots, working along each row from left to right. The example below is drawn for this guide. It shows the decisions you make on every box, including two traps worth knowing.

A habit worth building from the first sheet: let the shape suggest "maybe four", then confirm by counting any box that is not a clean square before you mark it. As the count becomes automatic, the confirmation gets faster without becoming a guess. The OPC's first tip for the tests is "Try to avoid wild guessing."

Search for Group Bourdon practice and you find printable PDF sheets, home-made sheets and tools that candidates share on forums (forum-reported and unverified), and timed online trainers. Each has a use. The table compares them on what matters for an attention test.

Our view: use a timed online trainer for the daily repetitions, because it times you, marks you and gives you a fresh sheet every run, and finish on paper. RSSB names the Group Bourdon as a paper test, and a pencil mark and a tap are different movements, so your groups per minute on a screen may not match your pace on paper. Compare yourself only with yourself, on the same medium.

This plan takes 10 to 20 minutes a day and climbs our trainer's ten levels. Days 1 and 2 use the free level 1; from day 3 it needs levels 2 to 10, which are paid. The targets are our own. The accuracy target is the trainer's "cleared" rule (at least 95%); the groups-per-minute figure is our arithmetic for the other half of that rule, reaching at least 60% of all the boxes over a full run: it is the pace that gets there if you use each sheet's full time, rounded up. Neither is an official pass mark: RSSB says RIS-3751-TOM issue four does not set pass marks, and each train company decides which it uses.

Two rules override the plan. If your accuracy drops below 95%, repeat the level instead of moving up: speed bought with errors is not progress. And the day your approved practice materials arrive, they come first. RSSB says candidates invited to an assessment are given them at least a week before the assessment date. Do them exactly as their instructions say, then use the trainer to keep your attention sharp between sessions.

Every run of our trainer ends with a result screen. These are the numbers on it, and what each one tells you to change.

The trainer also gives one line of advice from your own pattern: whether your errors were mostly misses or mostly wrong marks, whether your second half dropped, or whether you are accurate but too slow to reach enough of each sheet. None of this predicts a result at an assessment centre. The OPC's guide says that candidates are not given any scores of their assessments, and no official source we read publishes a pass mark.

Nothing on this list replaces the approved practice materials. What our trainer adds is daily repetition on freshly generated sheets, with your missed and wrong marks split and tracked over time.

Our reading of that: do not expect to reach the end of every test (The OPC says "not many people do"), and do not let the clock push you into marks you have not checked. The OPC adds that the tests are done in complete silence, so practise without music, a TV or a phone in view, and stop a session when you notice your attention slipping rather than grinding through tired.

The rules around the test matter to how you practise, because you have a limited number of attempts. In short, from RSSB's FAQ and ORR's guide:

The full rules, the retake date checker and what changed in issue four are in our hub guide to the train driver psychometric tests. A separate guide on Group Bourdon scoring and time limits is in preparation.

Rows marked The OPC come from its guide for candidates it assesses; at another centre, follow your train company's and the centre's instructions.