The CAT4 Test: A Parent's Guide to Format, Scoring & Prep

If you've heard your child is sitting the CAT4, it's worth understanding one thing straight away: unlike GL Assessment's county 11+ papers, CAT4 isn't primarily a pass-or-fail entrance exam. It's the Cognitive Abilities Test, Fourth Edition — a reasoning assessment, also published by GL Assessment, used by schools across the UK to understand how a child thinks, rather than what they've been taught.

Many schools use CAT4 purely as an internal benchmarking or streaming tool once a child has already joined — but some independent schools also use CAT4 as part of their assessment process, in some cases alongside other entrance assessments. It's always worth confirming with your target school exactly how they're using the result, since the two purposes call for slightly different conversations with your child.

What Does CAT4 Actually Test?

CAT4 is not a curriculum-attainment test — it's designed to assess reasoning ability rather than what a child has specifically been taught in class (though, worth noting, the Verbal Reasoning battery does still draw on a child's existing vocabulary and general language development). It measures reasoning across four batteries, each made up of two shorter subtests:

Battery	What It Measures	Subtests
Verbal Reasoning	Thinking with words and language	Verbal Classification, Verbal Analogies
Quantitative Reasoning	Thinking with numbers and number patterns	Number Analogies, Number Series
Non-Verbal Reasoning	Thinking with shapes and visual patterns	Figure Classification, Figure Matrices
Spatial Ability	Visualising, rotating and mentally manipulating shapes	Figure Analysis, Figure Recognition

For the digital version (Levels A–G), the eight tests are administered in three parts. Part 1 covers Figure Classification and Figure Matrices (20 minutes); Part 2 covers Verbal Classification, Verbal Analogies and Number Analogies (26 minutes); Part 3 covers Number Series, Figure Analysis and Figure Recognition (26 minutes) — note that the Quantitative Reasoning subtests are deliberately split across Parts 2 and 3, rather than grouped together. That's 72 minutes of actual test time in total.

Including instructions, examples, practice items, breaks and settling time between parts, the overall session runs considerably longer — typically around two hours, so don't be alarmed if your child describes a longer school day than the pure test-time figure suggests.

A useful thing to know: GL Assessment's own guidance says all four batteries should normally be taken together for the most accurate results — schools are advised not to pick and choose only one or two, except in specific cases (for example, exempting the Verbal battery for a child with English as an additional language).

How Is CAT4 Scored?

CAT4 isn't marked as a percentage or a raw score in the way a GL Assessment paper might be. Instead, results are reported as:

• Standard Age Score (SAS) — age-adjusted, centred on 100, the clearest way to compare a child against others their exact age.

• National Percentile Rank (NPR) — shows where a child sits relative to their peer group.

• Stanine — a simple 1–9 band for a quick, at-a-glance summary.

Because CAT4 isn't curriculum-based, there's no traditional national pass mark to aim for — which is exactly why it can feel unfamiliar to prepare for compared with a standard 11+ paper. (A school using CAT4 as part of admissions may still set its own internal threshold, but there's no universal score every school applies.)

One useful addition: a child's four battery SAS scores are typically averaged to produce an overall mean CAT4 score, giving a single at-a-glance figure alongside the four individual battery results.

CAT4 vs a Standard Entrance Exam

The most important mental shift for parents is this: CAT4 measures how your child reasons, not what they've memorised. A child who's behind on times tables but has strong underlying number-pattern reasoning can still score well on the Quantitative battery — and, just as importantly, a child who's raced ahead on rote-learned content won't automatically score higher here than their genuine reasoning ability supports.

One format nuance worth flagging, since it trips a lot of parents up: unlike an adaptive assessment such as the ISEB Common Pre-Test, CAT4 follows a fixed sequence of strictly timed tests rather than adjusting the difficulty of individual questions according to a child's answers. And CAT4 can be delivered either on paper or digitally, entirely at the school's discretion, so "digital" doesn't reliably mean "adaptive" here, and it's always worth checking which version your specific school uses.

How to Help Your Child Prepare

Because CAT4 isn't a memorisation test, "preparation" looks a little different from standard 11+ revision — but it isn't nothing.

1. Build genuine familiarity with the question formats. Children who've never seen a Figure Matrices or Number Analogies question before can lose easy marks simply through unfamiliarity with the shape of the question, regardless of their underlying reasoning ability. A handful of practice sessions across all four batteries removes that surprise.

2. Practise working at pace, not depth. Many CAT4 subtests allow only a short amount of time per question, so the test rewards quick, confident pattern recognition over slow, careful working. This is a different muscle from the deep, methodical problem-solving we build for something like a GL Maths paper.

3. Don't over-drill it like a curriculum exam. Because CAT4 measures underlying reasoning rather than taught content, extensive cramming has a lower ceiling here than it does for a knowledge-based paper. Time is generally better spent on broad reasoning practice — puzzles, pattern games, spatial-awareness activities — than repetitive past-paper drilling.

4. Ask your school what the result is actually used for. If CAT4 is being used as part of entrance selection, treat it seriously and prepare accordingly. If it's a post-admission baseline or streaming tool, the priority shifts from "performing well" to simply making sure your child understands the question formats and isn't thrown by an unfamiliar test on the day.

If you'd like help understanding how your target school uses CAT4, or a structured plan to build genuine reasoning confidence ahead of it, you can read more about how I work with families or get in touch directly.