About Wamberry

For many early-career roles, a timed numerical, verbal or logical test comes early in the process, and some employers use a score threshold to decide who moves on. Candidates are not always given feedback. Scores also rise with familiarity, so a capable candidate who has never met the question formats can be at a disadvantage against one who has practised them.

Wamberry was started by someone who experienced that from the wrong side: a test he had never prepared for decided the outcome before any person had looked at his application.

Reasoning tests are scored against a key, so the skills they measure can be learned and practised: reading a data table quickly, spotting the structure of an argument, finding the rule behind a sequence of shapes. That is what Wamberry trains, across numerical, verbal, logical and abstract reasoning and situational judgement.

We deliberately do not offer personality questionnaires. They have no correct answers to learn, and we will not pretend to coach people into a profile.

At university, William found that most exams came down to one question: could you recall what you had learned, quickly, under pressure? What changed his results was Anki, the flashcard app built on some of the best-supported findings in learning science.

The problem is forgetting. In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus memorised lists of nonsense syllables and measured how fast he lost them. Most of the loss happened within the first day, and after that it slowed down: the forgetting curve [1]. A full replication in 2015 found much the same curve [2].

Two methods flatten that curve. The first is active recall: pulling an answer out of memory strengthens it far more than reading it again. In one well-known study, students who tested themselves remembered much more a week later than students who spent the same time re-reading [3]. The second is spaced repetition. Each review, timed just as memory starts to fade, makes the next drop slower, and practice spread out over time beats the same practice crammed into one go [4]. A major review of ten study techniques rated these two as the most effective [5].

Reasoning tests reward the same thing. Strong candidates recognise a pattern they have worked through before and know the method straight away. Wamberry applies these principles to psychometric tests: you answer instead of reading, you get a worked method each time you miss, and missed question types come back later, spaced out. The aim is that, on test day, the method comes to you without effort.

1. Ebbinghaus, H. (1885/1913). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. Trans. H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius.
2. Murre, J. M. J., & Dros, J. (2015). Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0120644.
3. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
4. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
5. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

Adaptive difficulty. Every question and every user carries a live rating on one shared scale, so practice stays at the level where you learn most. The mathematics is published in full.

Worked solutions for every miss. Each wrong answer comes with the underlying principle, the structure of the problem and a heuristic you can reuse on the next one of its kind.

Spaced practice. Similar question types are spread out rather than repeated back to back, and once you have answered every question in a section, the ones you missed come back for review.

Verified questions only. Every item is original and every answer key is independently checked before it goes live.

Wamberry is an independent Swedish business founded by William Ambery. William on LinkedIn. Questions, corrections and partnership enquiries are welcome at contact@wamberry.com.