The purpose of the Supervised Public Service Entrance Exam (PSEE) 371 is to assess your reasoning and judgement skills for officer-level positions in the federal public service. Hiring managers use your score from this exam on its own or as the final step in a two-step assessment process, following an unsupervised version of the test (i.e., PSEE UIT 370). This exam can also be used to assist managers in making selection decisions for appointments or placing individuals in training programs.
The PSEE 371 is a supervised test composed of two separately timed Sub-tests:
Sub-Test 1: Reasoning
This test is designed to assess reasoning and problem-solving ability and consists of 30 multiple choice questions. There are four types of questions:
- Arithmetic reasoning;
- Logical reasoning;
- Analytical reasoning; and
- Number or letter series.
The time limit is 90 minutes to complete this sub-test.
Sub-Test 2: Judgement
This test is designed to assess judgement skills required for solving problems in work-related situations and consists of 40 multiple choice questions.
The time limit is 60 minutes to complete this sub-test.
Total test time: Total test time is approximately three hours, which includes 30 minutes of administration time.
Passing marks
Sub-test 1: The minimum pass mark is 13/30 (10th percentile or higher), which means that you must place in the top 90 percent of a large group of previous test takers (normative sample).
Sub-test 2: The minimum pass mark is 3400/ 4000 (35th percentile or higher), which means that you must place in the top 65 percent of the normative sample.
As similar in the unsupervised PSEE, hiring managers set the pass mark as high as the 50th percentile for both sub-tests. In other words, to pass a sub-test, an applicant would have to place in the top 50 percent of the normative sample for the sub-test. This corresponds to a score of 21/30 (70 percent) for Sub-test 1 and 3461/4000 (86.5 percent) for Sub-test 2. As evident by these scores, your final score on Sub-test 2 will have a stronger impact.
Global score: A global score is calculated for the PSEE 371 that ranges from 0 to 73, the global score is similar to a “z score”. The score is calculated to provide managers with an overall idea of your performance on the exams as compared to other candidates. Sub-test 1 is worth 60 percent of the global score, whereas Sub-test 2 accounts for the remaining 40 percent. Prior to calculating the global score, the sub-tests are converted to a common scale.
Re-test
There is a 180 day waiting period before you can rewrite the test. Any attempts to rewrite the test before the 180 day waiting period will not affect your score, but will extend your 180 days waiting period from the day that you re-wrote the test.