Free SHL Practice for the Commission's Internal Competitions: What Actually Exists

The free practice most candidates find is for the wrong test

If you search for free SHL practice, you will find a lot of it. Most of it will not prepare you for the test that now stands at the entrance to the European Commission's internal competitions.

SHL does not sell one cognitive test. It sells a family of them, and two members of that family share almost the same name. There is a non-interactive Verify General Ability test, answered by picking from a list of options. And there is Verify Interactive G+, where you answer by dragging, arranging and constructing rather than by choosing. The 2026 Commission internal competitions use the interactive one.

The two differ in item count as well as in format. That matters more than it sounds. Spending six weeks on multiple-choice reasoning and then meeting a drag-and-drop matrix under a live clock is not a small adjustment — it is a different motor skill on top of the same reasoning.

So the first useful thing free practice can do for you is not "more questions". It is making sure you have seen the actual thing you will be asked to do.

What the test actually is

Before judging any practice source, it helps to have the target fixed.

The cognitive assessment at the gate of the 2026 Commission internal competitions is adaptive: 24 questions in 36 minutes, split roughly evenly into eight numerical, eight inductive and eight deductive items. The difficulty of each question responds to how you answered the last one, and you cannot go back. There is no negative marking. The cut-off is not a fixed score but a percentile — the 60th of the benchmark group — and it works as an eligibility gate rather than a score you carry forward.

Three consequences follow, and they change what "good practice" means:

• Speed is scored indirectly. At 90 seconds per item on average, hesitation on one question is paid for on the next.
• Early questions carry weight. On an adaptive test, the first items steer where the rest of the test goes.
• Deductive reasoning is the new one. The classic verbal reasoning test that EPSO candidates know is not in this format at all. Its place is taken by deductive items — syllogisms, ordering and scheduling problems, "which of these must be true". Most people sitting these competitions have never taken a test like it.

The free source almost nobody uses: SHL's own

The best free practice for an SHL test is published by SHL.

SHL Direct offers around 25 free practice tests, and the interactive formats are in there: numerical reasoning, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning and a general ability test, several of them in the drag-and-drop format rather than multiple choice. No purchase, no third-party interpretation of what the items look like — these are the publisher's own.

It is genuinely the first place to go, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the one link that most preparation advice quietly leaves out.

Its limits are real, though, and you should know them before you rely on it:

• It is in English. The language selectors on the site cover English, Chinese and Japanese — not the French, German, Spanish or Italian that many Commission staff would rather be tested in.
• It has no EU context. The items are built for general recruitment, so the numerical data is about product sales and staff headcounts, not budget lines or Eurostat tables.
• It is not the competition's structure. You get individual practice tests, not a 24-item adaptive sitting with a 36-minute clock and a percentile at the end.

In other words: perfect for meeting the item formats, insufficient for rehearsing the exam.

What the commercial free tiers give you

Beyond the publisher, the free layer is thin, and it is worth being precise about how thin.

JobTestPrep, whose paid SHL pack is the best known in this space, publishes a free page with sample items — its own figure is 14 questions and answers across the various sections. That is a genuine free sample and a fair look at their explanation style. It is a sample, not a preparation.

The same company's paid pack for the interactive test is advertised as "the only preparation for the SHL Verify Interactive (G+) on the market" (jobtestprep.co.uk, consulted 27 August 2026). That claim is worth checking against the two paragraphs above: SHL publishes free interactive practice for the same three abilities, and you are reading a page that links to another one. When a claim of exclusivity is that easy to test, test it — and apply the same habit to every other claim you meet while preparing, including ours.

Where free practice runs out

Free practice solves one problem well: it stops the format from being a surprise. On an adaptive test that is worth more than it is on a linear one, because the cost of a slow, confused start is not just that question.

What it does not solve is everything after the 36 minutes. The cognitive assessment is a gate, not the competition. Clearing it puts you in front of an EU-knowledge MCQ and then a written test, and no free SHL resource covers either — they are not SHL products and they are specific to the EU institutions. Nor does free practice give you the thing that decides most outcomes: repeated, timed exposure in the language you will actually sit the test in.

That is the honest shape of it. Start with SHL Direct, because it is free and it is the source. Use the samples to calibrate. Then be clear-eyed that the parts nobody gives away free — the EU-specific stages, the five-language practice, the adaptive rehearsal at full length — are the parts that decide who is on the list.

What to do this week

1. Take the SHL Direct interactive tests for numerical, deductive and inductive reasoning. Not for the score — to see the item formats with your own hands.
2. Time yourself at 90 seconds per item. If you are consistently over, the problem to solve is pacing, not reasoning.
3. Give deductive reasoning the most time. It is the section you have least history with, and the one where a method learned in an afternoon changes the outcome.
4. Then rehearse the whole thing. EU-now's SHL simulator is free and runs the adaptive format in all five of our languages, and the EU-knowledge and written stages sit alongside it.

If you want the full breakdown of the format before you start, our complete guide to the SHL cognitive test covers it section by section, and what SHL Verify Interactive G+ is covers the test itself. If you are still working out whether the internal route is yours to take, internal versus external competitions is the place to start.