The CAT4 Test: What It Measures and How Schools Use It

CAT4, the Cognitive Abilities Test, Fourth Edition, is a reasoning assessment published by GL Assessment and used by several thousand UK schools to gauge how a child thinks, tested across four separate batteries: verbal, quantitative, non-verbal and spatial reasoning. Many independent schools use it as part of entry testing alongside other assessments, while schools already teaching a child often sit a whole year group to inform target-setting and to identify pupils who need extra stretch or support.

CAT4 is standardised nationally, so GL Assessment converts a child's raw answers into a standard age score set against same-age peers, alongside a stanine banding and a national percentile rank, meaning a score of 100 always represents the national average whatever level or age group is tested. The test carries no pass mark, and schools normally read its results alongside other information about a child, including attainment tests, interview and, at many senior schools, entrance assessments such as the ISEB Common Pre-Test or Quest.

What is CAT4 and who publishes it?

CAT4 stands for the Cognitive Abilities Test, Fourth Edition, and is published by GL Assessment, a UK test provider that also produces attainment tests such as the Progress Test series and the New Group Reading Test. CAT4 measures reasoning ability, the kind of thinking that underpins learning across subjects and sits apart from what a child has already been taught, giving a school a picture of a pupil's underlying reasoning separate from the curriculum they have covered.

GL Assessment standardises CAT4 against a large national sample of pupils and revalidates the norms each year against a much larger group of test-takers, which is what allows a score from any sitting to be compared meaningfully against other children of the same age nationally.

What do the four batteries measure?

CAT4 is built from four batteries, each targeting a distinct kind of reasoning. The verbal battery asks a child to reason with words, classifying them and completing analogies; the quantitative battery asks a child to reason with numbers, working out relationships in sequences and pairs; the non-verbal battery asks a child to reason with shapes and figures, spotting shared properties and completing figural analogies; and the spatial battery asks a child to reason in three dimensions, mentally folding, unfolding and rotating figures. Except at the youngest levels, each battery contains two separate tests, so CAT4 produces eight sub-scores that combine into the four battery scores.

• Verbal reasoning: thinking with words, tested through verbal classification and verbal analogies
• Quantitative reasoning: thinking with numbers, tested through number analogies and number series
• Non-verbal reasoning: thinking with shapes and diagrams, tested through figure classification and figure matrices
• Spatial reasoning: thinking in three dimensions, tested through figure analysis and figure recognition

What levels and ages does CAT4 cover?

CAT4 covers children from around six years old to seventeen and beyond, split into ten levels running from Levels X and Y at the youngest end through Pre-A and then Levels A to G, each matched to a year group in England and Wales. A school normally sits a child at the level matched to their year group, though GL Assessment allows a school to move a child to an adjacent level where that gives a fairer test, for instance ahead of a transition to a new school or within a particularly able year group. Because scores are standardised separately for each level, a standard age score of 100 means the same thing, the national average for that age, whichever level a child sits.

How is CAT4 taken?

CAT4 is a timed test sat under formal, exam-style conditions, usually delivered on a computer or tablet though a paper version exists at some levels, and takes around two hours in total split across three sittings for most year groups, or two shorter sittings for the youngest children. Every child answers the same fixed set of questions in the same order, since CAT4 is not adaptive, and each of the eight sub-tests opens with a short set of practice questions that are not timed and can be repeated, so a child understands the format before the timed section begins.

What do CAT4 scores mean?

A CAT4 score report gives a standard age score for each of the four batteries, adjusted for a child's exact age in years and months and set against a national average of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, so scores above 100 sit above the national average for age and scores below it sit below. Alongside the standard age score, a report gives a stanine, a banding from 1 to 9 where 4 to 6 covers the average range, and a national percentile rank showing the percentage of same-age pupils nationally who scored the same or lower; a percentile rank of 84, for example, means a child scored as well as or better than 84 in every 100 pupils their age.

Reports also give a profile description, comparing a child's verbal and spatial scores to describe a bias towards verbal or spatial reasoning, or no clear bias where the two sit close together, which is the most common pattern. GL Assessment builds a confidence band around each score, so a school can judge whether a gap between two of a child's battery scores reflects a genuine difference in reasoning strengths or falls within normal variation, and none of these figures carries a pass mark.

How do schools use CAT4 for entry and in year groups?

Independent schools that use CAT4 as part of entry testing typically set their own threshold score for the level they use, since GL Assessment does not publish a pass mark and leaves interpretation of results to each school, often reading CAT4 alongside an interview, school reference and, at many senior schools, other assessments such as the ISEB Common Pre-Test or Quest. Because three of the four batteries do not depend on English vocabulary, schools also use CAT4 to assess reasoning ability in children learning English as an additional language, where a lower verbal score against stronger non-verbal, quantitative and spatial scores is common and expected.

Schools with a child already on roll typically sit a whole year group at the start of the school year, using CAT4 results to help set target grades for GCSEs, A-levels or the International Baccalaureate, to inform setting and grouping, and to flag pupils whose reasoning ability sits notably above or below their current classroom attainment. A school may follow this up with an attainment test such as the Progress Test series, to check whether potential and performance line up.

Can a child prepare for CAT4?

GL Assessment advises against any targeted practice ahead of CAT4, on the grounds that coaching for the test undermines its purpose of capturing a child's natural reasoning and risks distorting the comparison the test is designed to make. Familiarisation is built into the test itself instead: every sub-test opens with untimed example questions that a child may repeat before the timed section starts, so the format is not a surprise on the day.

Where a child has never sat a timed, exam-style assessment before, understanding what the day will involve, reading instructions carefully, moving on from a question that is taking too long, tends to matter more than rehearsing question types, since GL Assessment's guidance to schools explicitly asks them to reassure parents that no preparation can be done for the test itself.

How does CAT4 differ from attainment tests, the ISEB Common Pre-Test and Quest?

An attainment test, such as a Progress Test in English or maths, checks how much of the taught curriculum a child has learned so far, while CAT4 looks at the reasoning that underlies learning generally and sits apart from any curriculum. Schools that use both together, a practice GL Assessment calls triangulation, compare a child's reasoning ability against their measured attainment to see whether the two line up or whether a child appears to be working above or below what their reasoning ability would predict.

The ISEB Common Pre-Test, set by the Independent Schools Examinations Board, is a different instrument used specifically as an entrance assessment for independent senior schools, sat once in Year 6 or Year 7 with results shared across every school a family applies to. Unlike CAT4, it is adaptive, with question difficulty adjusting to a child's answers as the test proceeds, and it combines English and mathematics with verbal and non-verbal reasoning, where CAT4 covers four reasoning batteries only and includes no English or mathematics content.

Quest, run separately by Quest Assessments, is a bespoke entrance testing service that individual schools commission and configure to their own requirements, so its content and structure vary from school to school instead of following a single fixed format the way CAT4 does.

Official guidance

The rules and processes in this guide are drawn from the official pages below, which are the place to confirm the current position before making a decision.

• gl-assessment.co.uk/products/cat4/
• support.gl-assessment.co.uk/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/general-info
• support.gl-assessment.co.uk/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/general-info
• support.gl-education.com/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/general-informa
• support.gl-assessment.co.uk/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/after-the-te
• support.gl-assessment.co.uk/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/before-the-t
• support.gl-education.com/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/general-informa
• gl-assessment.co.uk/solutions/independent/
• support.gl-assessment.co.uk/knowledge-base/assessments/cat4-support/appendices/a
• iseb.co.uk/assessments/common-pre-tests/

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