Practising one question at a time teaches you to answer. It does not teach you to hold out for 2 h 15 without leaving the exam, to live with a clock that never stops, or to decide fast when eight questions and eleven minutes are left.
The real-conditions test reproduces the constraint, not just the content. This page sets out exactly what it does: the formats available, where the clock lives, what is monitored during the exam, what the score means and what it does not.
The format settles three things at once: how many questions, how much time, and which modules are drawn. Once an attempt has started, none of it can be adjusted. That is the whole point of the exercise.
The two short formats cover a single module of your choosing. The two long formats mix the five modules in a fixed proportion, the one we use to model an AD5 exam: verbal reasoning 35 per cent, EU knowledge 25, digital skills 20, numerical reasoning 10, abstract reasoning 10.
Questions are drawn at random from the published bank in your language, every time you start. Two tests of the same format therefore never hold the same questions.
At the start, the server writes an end time into the database: start time plus the duration of the format. The countdown on your screen is only a mirror of that value. Moving your machine clock forward, suspending the tab or cutting the network does not move that end time.
Any answer sent after the end time is refused and the attempt turns to expired. You keep the answers already submitted, and the score is computed on what you had done.
Reloading the page loses nothing: the full state lives in the database, and the page rehydrates from the server row.
The exam runs in fullscreen. The switch is requested at the very moment you click to start, because browsers only allow it on an explicit user gesture.
Two gestures end the attempt: leaving fullscreen, or moving to another tab or window. In both cases the first occurrence triggers a visible warning and the second invalidates the attempt server side. Tab switching was aligned with the fullscreen regime in August 2026: staying in fullscreen while switching to another window had until then been the simplest way around the whole arrangement.
Other gestures are blocked and logged without invalidating anything. They are deterrent friction, not proof of cheating.
At the end, each module gets its success rate as a percentage of correct answers. For the two long formats, an overall score out of 100 applies the weighting described above. For the two short formats, the overall score is simply the success rate of the chosen module.
We show no pass mark, and that is deliberate: pass thresholds are set competition by competition in the official notice, and often completed by a ranking against the number of posts. A score here does not tell you that you would have passed; it tells you where you stand, module by module, under exam conditions.
An invalidated attempt produces no score, and neither does an abandoned one. An expired attempt produces a partial score, computed on the questions dealt with.
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