Would you like a better understanding of your child’s academic profile?
Do you want to help better monitor your child’s academic progress, and identify strengths as well as any areas for development that they may need to focus on?
Are you interested in understanding how your child compares to UK standards, providing a clear idea of how they are achieving in relation to their peers?
Would you like insights into potential pathways for your child at sixth form and beyond?
The Academic Profiling Test (APT) has been created to provide a comprehensive evaluation of academic skills for children aged between six and sixteen years of age. It is the result of collaboration between experts in assessment, former heads and principals of schools and educationalists, using the highest quality teacher-written test questions and semi-adaptive technology.
The APT provides a clear and detailed understanding of your child’s overall academic profile.
It helps monitor your child’s academic progress, identifying strengths as well as areas that need further development.
It benchmarks your child against students from schools across the UK, showing how they compare nationally.
It offers insight into how your child is achieving in relation to peers internationally.
It can be used to demonstrate your child’s academic performance to future schools.
It supports informed decision-making when selecting future schools and universities.
The APT is accessed online and the whole assessment can be completed in the comfort of your own home and or in the presence of a tutor.
There are four sections to the APT:
Speak to your academic consultant about registering for APT, they will collect your child’s details and register them with APT. If you do not have an academic advisor or they are not yet an APT partner you can email unifuturesdxb@gmail.com
The overall score is an average of the candidate’s english, maths, verbal, and non-verbal standard age scores. It is a broad indicator of their performance in the APT. An average UK school student would score 100 in this assessment; the highest mark is 150, and the lowest is 50.
The Standard Age Score (SAS) is the main measurement we derive from the APT. It is commonly used in standardised assessments to account for the candidate’s age and the difficulty of the questions they have answered. The SAS is calculated by taking the performance score, adjusting it for age and placing it on a scale that compares performance against a representative sample of candidates who have taken the same test.
An average score is 100. Most candidates score between 90 and 110; this is commonly referred to as the ‘normal range.’ Candidates scoring higher than 110 are statistically stronger than others of the same age and those scoring less than 90 are weaker than their peers. The lowest score is 50 and the highest is 150.
The Stanine (ST) places the candidate’s score on a scale of
1 (low) to 9 (high) and offers a broad overview of his or her performance.
The APT consists of four subjects; English, Maths, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning. Each subject consists of a wide range of tasks and assesses multiple skills in that area.
This section assesses command of the English language and tests comprehension, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Comprehension tasks will consist of questions on a short piece of fiction or non-fiction to assess how well the candidate understands the text.
Candidates need a good grasp of English and have a wide vocabulary, but equally important is their ability to read questions carefully, remain calm, and work within the time limits.
Questions look into the meaning and use of words and whether candidates can derive meaning from contextual clues by interpreting texts and analyzing information.
Reading (and writing) in a variety of different styles and genres, and broadening the student’s vocabulary, focusing on synonyms (similar words) and antonyms (opposites), is particularly beneficial preparation for this section.
The maths test is designed to see how well a candidate understands numbers and can solve mathematical problems.
The maths section is based on expected skills taught in the UK National Curriculum up to Year 11 (GCSEs). It will include questions that assess:
Some maths skills are assessed as part of the verbal reasoning tests and include number sequencing, completing the sum, and inferring how numbers are related. Maths is a fundamental academic skill that underpins many other subjects and specialisms; we also expect maths performance to affect other reasoning skills such as VR and NVR.
‘Maths is a fundamental academic skill that underpins many other subjects and specialisms; we expect maths performance to affect other reasoning skills such as verbal and non-verbal reasoning.’
The verbal reasoning (VR) section is intended to test a candidate’s ability to understand and reason using words and is a test of skill rather than of learned knowledge. It involves thinking about text, solving word problems, following written instructions to come up with a solution, spotting letter sequences, and cracking letter- and number-based codes.
Verbal reasoning is often seen as the underlying skill for critical thinking, problem-solving, and ultimately, intelligence, and often makes up a large proportion of an IQ test.
The majority of verbal reasoning questions are word-based, but some are based on numbers.
For example, a question might ask you to provide the next number in a sequence (1, 5, 9, 13…), or you might have to solve a sum where the numbers are represented by letters (so if A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, and so on, C+A=4).
Although these questions require maths, the main principle is to test the candidate’s ability to solve problems based on written instructions.
Non-verbal reasoning (NVR) is best described as problem-solving using pictures, diagrams, and shapes (rather than words). Unlike verbal reasoning, these tasks are not reliant on the candidate’s mastery of the English language; rather, the questions use drawings, shapes, or codes, and the candidate is expected to work out sequences, similarities, and differences between these images.
NVR tasks are designed to assess critical thinking and problem-solving using logic. They indicate the potential of a candidate’s broader mathematical capabilities and their powers of deduction.
Candidates will benefit from a good understanding of mathematical concepts such as symmetry, rotation, direction, and shape.
NVR skills are often seen in people with good spatial awareness, those who can easily orient themselves in maps or follow visual diagrams.
Like verbal reasoning, NVR is used as an indicator of academic potential and intelligence rather than a measure of learned knowledge or facts.
APT has worked with a bank of over 10,000 teacher-written (and reviewed) questions based on specific UK curriculum skills for five years. These questions have been tested with thousands of learners worldwide and the scores are calculated by comparing a candidate’s performance against this large cohort of previous test takers.
APT uses a fully adaptive system which enables the test to select harder or easier questions based on the candidate’s answers. This means that if the questions are too hard, the system selects easier content to gain greater insight into the candidate’s skill. Likewise, if they are too easy then harder and harder questions will occur. The assessment stops once it is confident it has an accurate measurement.
No specific preparation is required before taking the APT, the test is a measure of generic academic skills rather than learned knowledge, so no short term preparation will significantly impact performance. However, it may be beneficial for candidates to familiarise themselves with the style of questions that are used in this kind of assessment to ensure they feel comfortable on their test day.
There are numerous sample papers available online for CAT-style assessments online; a quick internet search will find some free resources.
Yes, but improving scores on this kind of assessment is not always straightforward. APT results will indicate how a candidate compares against their peers. As time goes by and a candidate’s skills improve, so too do their peers, so unless they are improving at a greater rate than other students in their year, their scores will appear largely the same.
One very useful aspect of the APT is the breakdown of specific sub-skills within subject areas. These indicate specific skills that can be worked on to improve performance in this kind of test. We recommend discussing APT results with an academic consultant and/or tutor to focus your time on the areas that need the most support.
Contact unifuturesdxb@gmail.com and we will be able to assist you in registering for the assessment.
APT is the assessment tool of Constellation Education (Constellation Group Consultancy and Management, IFZA, Dubai)
At UniFutures, our mission is to empower students to thrive academically, emotionally and personally throughout their university journey.
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