The Environment Agency scores you as a percentile, and sets a minimum before interview

Nothing in the Environment Agency's process is a numerical or verbal reasoning test, so no practice test of ours is a close match. Our reasoning test is here only for applicants who want a general warm-up for timed online tasks, or who are also applying to employers that do use SHL-style tests.

The early careers screen is an Arctic Shores behavioural assessment made of game-style tasks with no right or wrong answers, and standard roles use a written competency sift and an interview. Practising maths or verbal questions will not change your score on either. The useful preparation is the in-assessment practice task and well-built STAR examples.

The Agency's graduate page gives its reason plainly: graduates usually have little work experience to draw on, so instead of asking for professional examples it measures behaviours that predict success in the job. The three it names are planning and managing your workload, completing tasks and tracking progress, and adapting and building relationships.

That changes what preparation means. There is no syllabus to revise and no answer key to learn. What you can control is the conditions: a quiet room, a working device, enough time, and a clear head. Our guide to game-based assessments explains how this family of tests works across employers.

The graduate scheme page says the assessment scores you on success criteria and gives you an overall percentile rating, and that a minimum rating is set for the programme. Score below it and you will not be invited to interview. A percentile compares you with other people, so it says nothing about a fixed number of correct answers.

The Agency does not publish the minimum. Because the tasks measure natural style, trying to guess what the Agency wants and performing to it tends to backfire. Arctic Shores' own help centre says there is no right or wrong way to approach the tasks and warns that outside cheat guides lead to poor or invalid measures.

Arctic Shores describes its assessment as a series of tasks rather than questions, unlocked one after another. Which tasks you see depends on what the employer chose to measure. Some tasks are deliberately hard or ambiguous, and one employer's guide reassures candidates not to worry about failing to finish every task.

There is a practice task in the opening section, launched from a button on the assessment link. It does not count towards your score and doubles as a device check. Arctic Shores says practice is not needed because no skill is involved, but a single run through the practice task removes the surprise of an unfamiliar screen.

For ordinary vacancies the Environment Agency works differently. Your written competency examples are blind sifted by an independent panel, which may include external partners. The Agency recommends the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) for both the application and the interview, and one posting suggests putting most of your words into the action and the result.

Interviews usually last about an hour. Some run on Microsoft Teams two to three weeks after the closing date and others in person. Some roles add a presentation, a business discussion or a role play, and the Agency says it tells you in advance. The candidate pack for each role lists the capabilities being assessed, and it is the document to work from.

Applicants who need reasonable adjustments for the assessment or interview can contact the Agency's early careers team at eacareerentry@environment-agency.gov.uk. Ask before you start the game-based assessment, not after, since adjustments are easiest to arrange in advance.

Under the Disability Confident scheme the Agency commits to interviewing disabled applicants, as defined by the Equality Act 2010. Check your candidate pack for how that interacts with the assessment threshold on the scheme you are applying to.

These come from anonymous reviews, university careers pages and prep guides. They often disagree, and Environment Agency has not confirmed them. Read them as leads, not rules.

• A Glassdoor reviewer describes unusual online personality and skill tasks followed by no reply, so experiences of feedback vary.
• A third-party test site mentions an assessment centre as the final step for some graduate roles, which the Agency's own pages that we read do not describe.
• An employer guide on the Arctic Shores platform lists 8 tasks of around 5 to 10 minutes each, and another says 30 to 50 minutes in total; lengths vary by employer.