Third Secretary Competition - 2024

Yes I also was thinking that. Why use this algorithm to increase difficulty for the only test you're not using? It makes no sense.

Does the software have a calculator function in it? Seems absolutely absurd that no online device is allowed for just a calculating function. There’s no benefit whatsoever to using the Internet.

I’ve just completed the tests. I completely agree with the comments about AI generated questions, some of the wording was so clunky and unnatural. I found the numerical reasoning quite difficult even after studying for it, but mostly because I was frustrated by the wording of a lot of questions; I felt like most of them weren’t specific enough about what they wanted tbh. Felt like I had loads of “cannot say” on the verbal reasoning.

I just finished the numerical and verbal.

Numerical took me about 20 mins, mainly due to one question where I didn’t understand what they were looking for at all and two where I could swear I was doing the right calculation but the answer I got wasn’t one of the options… One in particular where I had to make an average of 4 numbers and I couldn’t for love nor money figure out how they arrived at the presented options.

Verbal took 14 mins, some felt extremely ambiguous…

No worries, hope it went well :) Just finished mine - spent a good 25-30 mins on the numerical, but the questions definitely got much harder towards the end.

Did anyone else get the question about the average business miles for cars ? seemed simple but I didn’t arrive at any of the answers

i did - if we are on about the same question, from what I remember it was ( avg business kms / kms per litre )*price per litre * number of medium cars in fleet

At least from my memory of that (similar sounding) question, it was to get the annual cost of fuel for the fleet of medium size cars at something like €1.12 per litre. Think it gave 22 cars in the fleet, total km’s travelled at around 11k, and they told you (or I calculated it I can’t remember) that a medium car does 17km per litre. The way I got my answer then was to get the total amount of annual litres (something like 600-700 by giving the total km travelled by the km per litre figure) x amount of cars. It matched one of the answers available, which from memory was around 14k (I think!). Could be wrong of course, but I just moved on once I saw a matching answer.

I personally felt that it was very AI generated especially the numerical, One batch of questions felt very guessy in terms of the numbers on a graph but I feel like I preformed well enough. The Verbal reasoning was incredibly longwinded and I feel like I only said 'true' to maybe 2 statements across the entire assessment. I also feel the personality quiz part is a bit BS cause nobody will be like 'I am not organized'. I hope I am wrong but I am afraid that when the results are out the difference in scores will be marginal but the OOM will be hundreds!

I have pretty similar views to most of you on stage 1. I found the numerical very challenging. Hopefully the passing score will be somewhat modest and we will all hit it. I didn't find the verbal very challenging, although I did get quite a few 'cannot say' responses.

The questionnaire was fine, I think the key here is to think about potential situations you would encounter as a third sec and try and tell the marking team what they want to hear. For example, the competency "adhering to strict rules and procedures", this obviously sounds like it would be important in a government organization, but you must also remember that many smaller embassies may only have 1/2 diplomats, so there would be a greater need for outside the box thinking/action.

The SJT at the end was also reasonable I thought, although I did find it strange that the first 5/6 scenarios were all hypothetical examples specifically designed with the civil service in mind. Yet, the last few were just very generic in nature. It felt like they had just generated random scenarios at the end to meet the quota.

Best of luck to everybody, we have a few weeks now until results are in. I am going to remain optimistic and start practising for the précis exam. I had one for my current role in DFAT and they can be very challenging.

Of course. For my current role, we were given a text of about 1200 words and were asked to summarise it into no more than 350 words. We had about 1 hour to complete this task and submit it. The text was thematically relevant, so it wasn't just any random newspaper article or essay. Hope that helps :)

EDIT: Thinking back, I think we were given 40/45 minutes. These tests are pretty difficult, so preparation is definitely recommended if you want to do well. There are also very few resources of decent quality available online regarding how to approach these sorts of tests, so quite a change from the world of assessment centres.

Does anyone know in our results do we get the answers to our questions etc or just a score ?

I didn’t have shipping containers but I did have some questions that none of the answers seemed right. It’s probably cope, but maybe there’s some ai generation fuckery there.