Federal Exams
The postal assessments, the Foreign Service Officer Test, FBI Phase I, the Border Patrol and CBP Officer exams, the TSA battery, the air traffic skills assessment, the Secret Service exam and USA Hire.
All of them in the same subscription, so you do not have to know which agency will call you back before you subscribe.
Shapes, times and rules below are the agencies’ own published figures. They change — the Foreign Service test was rebuilt in October 2025 — so confirm yours with the agency before you plan around it.
Before the list
Two of them are why people lose a federal opportunity on logistics rather than on knowledge.
A postal invitation gives you 72 hours. A notice of examination opens and closes on the agency’s calendar, not yours. The useful state to be in is ready before the email arrives, which is the whole argument for studying continuously rather than buying a pack when the window opens.
The Postal Service applies a one-year wait after a score below 70. Other agencies set their own retest rules and they are not the same. This is the reason a readiness estimate that tells you the truth is worth more than a practice score that flatters you.
Some report a score against a threshold. Some rank you against everyone else who sat it that cycle and take from the top — the Foreign Service test works that way now. A percentage on a practice pack means something quite different in each case, and the readiness estimate here reflects which kind you are sitting.
Situational judgment, work styles, accuracy checking, figural reasoning, memory and X-ray recognition are tasks, not subjects. You do not revise them, you practice them — on material you have not seen before, which is exactly what a fixed bank cannot give you.
USAJOBS, the agency’s own careers site, or a notice of examination. We prepare you for the test. Registration, scheduling, scoring, ranking and hiring are the agency’s and nobody outside it can influence them — including us.
Which is a real difference from the licensing world, and it changes the arithmetic: the expensive part of a federal application is the time, and the cost of a failure is the wait before you can try again.
United States Postal Service
Four Virtual Entry Assessments, one per job family, and the same three ingredients in different proportions.
You get 72 hours from the invitation, and a score below 70 costs you a year.
Situational judgment set on a delivery route, accuracy checking against addresses and forms, and work-scenario and background items. The accuracy section is where careful people lose points: it is not hard, it is fast, and the difference between two addresses is often one transposed digit.
Situational judgment and work styles set in a processing plant, plus accuracy checking. The physical side of the job is assessed elsewhere; this is the written half.
Situational judgment, work-scenario and work-style items around machine operation, sorting and shift work.
The window and the phone: judgment about a customer with a problem, and the work-style items that go with a public-facing role.
The one-year wait is the reason this page exists. A postal assessment is not a test you cram for in the 72 hours you are given, because the sections that decide it — judgment and accuracy — are habits rather than facts. The sensible move is to have practiced them before an invitation arrives. If you are already inside the wait, your profile stays here and everything you learn during it still counts on the day it lifts.
U.S. Department of State
Rebuilt in October 2025: logical reasoning in, the situational-judgment section and the personal-narrative essays out.
Most of the preparation material on the shelf still describes the old one.
Three sections in the current format: job knowledge, English expression, and a logical-reasoning section that did not exist before. There is no passing score — candidates advance by rank, and the number who move on depends on how many the Department is taking that cycle. That single change reframes how you should study for it: you are not clearing a bar, you are placing in a field.
FBI · CBP · Secret Service
Different agencies, overlapping tests.
Logical reasoning and situational judgment turn up in all three, which is precisely the case one profile is built for.
About three hours across five sections: logical reasoning, figural reasoning, situational judgment, personality, and preferences and interests. The figural section — patterns and shape sequences with no words in them — is the one candidates have usually never seen, and it is trainable.
An experience record plus a proctored, computer-adaptive logical-reasoning test — adaptive meaning the questions get harder as you get them right, so a long run of easy items is not the good sign it feels like. Border Patrol adds a language requirement, satisfied by a Spanish test or by the Artificial Language Test, which measures how quickly you can learn a language you have never seen rather than one you already know.
Our simulation runs adaptively too, so the experience of the real one — the difficulty climbing under you, the stopping rule — is not new on the day.
Built to the parts the Secret Service publishes in its own preparation guide, and no further. Where an agency does not publish a section’s question count or weighting, we do not invent one — the practice forms cover every published section at the published length, and the page says so rather than implying a precision nobody outside the agency has.
TSA · FAA
Two exams that are mostly not reading.
They are perception, memory and spatial reasoning under a clock, and they are the least well served by anything on the shelf.
Two and a half hours: an X-ray object-recognition test of about a hundred images, plus a written section of fifty to sixty items. The X-ray half is the one people fail, and it is the one you cannot revise for by reading — you get better at it by seeing bags.
A multi-subtest aptitude assessment: memory, logic, spatial reasoning and simulation-style subtests. It measures how you handle several things at once, which is a strange thing to prepare for and a very poor thing to meet cold.
Office of Personnel Management
The assessment most federal applicants meet without ever having heard of it.
It is used across more than eighty agencies, and the invitation usually arrives with a deadline attached.
You apply on USAJOBS, the announcement closes, and an email tells you to complete an online assessment by a date. What is in it depends on the job series — reasoning, judgment and work-style assessments in different combinations — and the first time most people see any of it is when the clock is already running.
Assessment content, invitations, deadlines and results belong to OPM and the hiring agency. We prepare you for the shape of it. We cannot see your result, change it, or tell anyone about it.
Stated plainly
A federal application is a process with real consequences, and a study product that blurs its own edges is doing you harm.
$39/mo month to month, cancel any time. Launching Monday, April 5, 2027.
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