Unofficial. Every practice question on this site is original material written by Assize Careers. Our practice questions are written by us in the published formats. They are not the test publishers' own questions, we do not reproduce any publisher's items or convert your result into their scores or percentiles, and Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by any test publisher, assessment provider, regulator or law firm.
Legal recruitment uses tests it did not write. Employers buy them from assessment publishers, law schools use an admissions test owned by a consortium of universities, and the qualifying assessment for solicitors is set by the regulator. Each one publishes its format. None of them publishes its live questions, and nor do we.
The four formats, and the one assessment that is not a test of aptitude
- Critical thinking
- Five kinds of question about short factual passages: whether something follows, what has been assumed, and whether an argument is any good. Used by commercial firms at the screening stage.
- Verbal and numerical reasoning
- True, false or cannot say against a passage, and arithmetic against a table or a chart, both under a time limit the employer chooses rather than the publisher.
- Situational judgement
- Work scenarios with a set of possible responses to rate or rank, plus self-report statements about how you work. The Government Legal Profession recruits through the Civil Service version, which is the only one published under an open licence.
- The LNAT
- The admissions test some universities require for an undergraduate law degree. Twelve passage sets and 42 multiple-choice questions in 95 minutes, then one essay from five prompts in 40 minutes.
- The SQE
- Not an aptitude test. It is the examination you must pass to be admitted as a solicitor, it has a published syllabus, and the pass rates are published by the regulator. It belongs here because the question style is the same single-best-answer format.
The Bar Course Aptitude Test no longer exists
The Bar Standards Board abolished the requirement to pass the BCAT before starting vocational Bar training with effect from 31 July 2022, after the Legal Services Board approved its rule change. The board's own announcement of 11 July 2022 said it "no longer think[s] that the Bar Course Aptitude Test serves a useful purpose". The same page records what the test had been: a computerised 55-minute test of 60 multiple-choice questions, based on a Watson-Glaser psychometric test, delivered by Pearson VUE at £150 in the UK and £170 abroad.
It has not been required for over four years. Preparation for it is still on sale in places. If you are offered BCAT preparation, the requirement it prepares you for ended in 2022, and the money buys practice for a test nobody will ask you to sit.
What this site will not tell you about your score
No pass rate, no score improvement, no percentile. Three separate reasons, and all three are worth knowing before you buy anything from anybody in this market.
- Nobody has measured what practice does. There is no published study we can point to that measures the effect of practice material on a legal recruitment outcome, so any number attached to it would be invented.
- An objective claim needs evidence held before it is made. On 22 April 2026 the Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints against two HGV driver training companies over pass-rate claims. In one, a 92% figure was unsupported by documentary evidence and did not disclose that it counted candidates who passed after more than one attempt. In the other, a 72% rate across first and second attempts was held not to substantiate "high pass rates", and the ASA read "we ensure" as a promise of a likely positive outcome. The same reasoning applies to us.
- The norms are not ours to publish. The publishers of the critical-thinking and reasoning tests treat their scoring and their norm tables as confidential and, in one case, expressly as trade secrets. So there is no converter here that turns a practice score into a percentile or into "what a City firm wants". Where you see one, ask whose norms it used.
What we can honestly offer is original items, a full worked explanation for every answer and per-question timing. That is what the pages above contain, and it is all we claim.
What the official free material amounts to
Not much. The LNAT Consortium publishes two sample papers, both from 2010, and an on-screen tutorial. Pearson publishes one free practice booklet for the critical-thinking appraisal. The Civil Service publishes one unscored judgement-test demo. The Solicitors Regulation Authority publishes sample questions for the SQE. Every page in this section links to the official material for that test, because it is free, it is authentic, and you should sit it before you pay anyone for anything.
The LNAT Consortium goes further and publishes its own view of commercial preparation: it "does not recommend that you pay anyone who claims to be able to coach you for the test", and it endorses no preparatory materials, "whether provided commercially or free of charge". We quote that on our own LNAT page, because it is the rights holder's position and you are entitled to read it before you decide.
The official material is not the only free material, either, and it would be dishonest to imply that scored practice has to be paid for. AllAboutLaw gives away a scored critical-thinking practice test with a community comparison, and The Lawyer Portal a free timed LNAT engine of more than eighty questions with an illustrative score. Graduates First has a free tier on selected tests. Sit those before you pay anyone for anything, including us.
What is free here, and what is paid
Every format guide on this site is free and stays free, including the explanations of how marks are lost. The question banks themselves, the full-length timed sets and the per-question-type breakdown of your own attempts are in the paid plans: there is no free sample of them yet, and we would rather say so than advertise one that is not there.
How our questions are written
By us, to the published format, and to a written brief that specifies only the things the test owner has published: which subtest, which response scale, how long the stem runs, the time allowed. No real item is ever used as a pattern, no publisher's paper is fed to a model, and every question carries a recorded author and date. Formats are facts and can be taught. Questions are somebody's expression and stay theirs.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.