4 Must-know Facts About the Wonderlic Scholastic Level Exam

For every graduating highschool student, choosing which college or university to join can be the most nerve-wracking point in your life to date. 

This means that, before anything else, you will have to do everything in your power to prepare yourself and not only pass the school’s entrance exam, but also do well enough in it in order to reach the college’s mandated score threshold.

And more often than not, it is very likely that the exam that you will encounter will be the Wonderlic Scholastic Level Exam (SLE).

The Wonderlic Scholastic Level Test is primarily designed to act as a standardized college entrance exam for educational institutions in order to see if the student is worthy of joining its alumni.

That being said, here are a number of facts that you should know about the Wonderlic test so that you can be ready to tackle it.

1. It has four major subjects

When you take the Wonderlic SLE, you will be tested in four major areas, namely:

• Reading Comprehension – Where your grasp of grammar, spelling, word usage, word order, and understanding of the English language is measured.
• Numerical Reasoning – Where your ability to conduct simple to complex operations is measured.
• Logical Reasoning – Where your ability to discern shapes, patterns, and solve logical and deductive reasoning-type questions is measured.
• Graphical Reasoning – Where your ability to interpret statistical and graphical data is measured.

Due to how broad these subjects are and due to the fact that the difficulty of each question can range from easy to mind-bogglingly hard, it would be ideal to do your best in studying the aforementioned subjects as much as you can.

For prestigious colleges where the acceptance score is high, it is not uncommon for students to make good use of a Wonderlic SLE practice test so that they can become completely familiar with the subject matter and question format of the exam itself.

2. It has a very short time limit

It would not be called a Wonderlic assessment without its notorious time restriction.

When you take the Wonderlic Scholastic Level Test, or any Wonderlic-type test, you are expected to answer the exam within 12 minutes.

Considering the fact that the test contains 50 questions in total of varying difficulty, this means that on average, you only have around 14 or so seconds to spare PER QUESTION.

As a result, lingering too much on a single question can affect your results negatively because the time that you waste on a difficult question can be used on a subject that you are more familiar with.

3. Many questions are designed to waste your time

Similar to the point above, a number of questions in the Wonderlic itself are specifically designed to be ‘time traps’, meaning they are purposefully made to be absurdly difficult to calculate if it’s a math question or examine if it’s a logical reasoning or graphical data question.

This is because apart from the skills contained in the four subjects, the Wonderlic test also aims to measure the test-taker’s critical thinking skills.

The exam does this by making them recognize these time traps so that they can focus on easier questions where they can guarantee points, thus increasing the 14-second-per-question time limit significantly if they manage to ignore all time traps to answer everything else.

4. Guessing is not only allowed, but encouraged

Considering how many questions there are in the Wonderlic and that the test developers know that only a small percentage of test-takers can complete all 50 items, making an educated guess on questions that you are having trouble with is considered a valid tactic.

The reason behind this is because both difficult and hard questions are only worth one point each, and lingering too long on the difficult ones will only affect your ability to answer the other questions or cause you to panic.

By making an educated guess, there is still a chance for you to get a point compared to just leaving the question blank.

In summary…

There are many ways to tackle the Wonderlic Scholastic Level Assessment, allowing students from all walks of life to find the method that is the most convenient for them.

Some may choose to do the educated guess route, some may choose to study as hard as they can to try and get a perfect score, while others may choose to answer the easier questions first before going back to try and answer the difficult ones.