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The page is covered in small clusters of dots — threes, fours and fives, scattered in lines. Your job is to mark every cluster of exactly four, working left to right along each line, and to keep doing it while the clock runs.

Format

Five parts, about a minute each

Task

Mark every group of exactly four dots

Pacing

The part changes on the clock, finished or not

Scoring

Correct marks, against errors — both count

What it is really measuring

Not eyesight, and not counting. Three things:

• Sustained concentration. Can you hold one trivial rule steady for five minutes without drifting?
• Accuracy under pace. When you speed up, does your error rate stay flat or does it climb?
• Consistency across the parts. This is the one candidates never think about. Scorers can see part one against part five. A profile that falls off a cliff in the last part says something about you that a slightly lower but flat profile does not.

Consider why an operator cares. A driver reads signals, indications and speed boards for hours, and the failure mode that matters is not missing one on a bad day — it is the pattern of missing them after two hours. Group Bourdon is a five-minute proxy for that.

How it is scored

Exact keys are not published and differ by version, but every version rewards the same two things and punishes one. You gain from correct marks. You are measured on how far through the material you got. And errors count against you — both marking a group that is not a four, and, on most versions, skipping past one that is.

That asymmetry is the whole strategy. Working fast and sloppily can leave you with a lower score than working steadily and cleanly, because each wrong mark cancels a right one. Working slowly and perfectly fails differently: you never get far enough to show anything.

What you are aiming for is the fastest pace at which your error rate stays near zero, and the only way to find that pace is to sit the thing repeatedly and watch the two numbers move against each other.

The method

1. Read shapes, do not count. Four dots make a small square, a diamond, a kite, an L or a line. Five is visibly crowded; three is visibly sparse. Within a few practice runs you stop counting entirely and start recognising, and that is where the speed comes from. If you catch yourself going "one, two, three, four", you are still in the slow mode.
2. One direction, no revisiting. Left to right, line by line, never back. A second look at a cluster you already judged costs you two new ones and almost never changes the answer.
3. Keep a physical place marker. A fingertip under the line on paper, the cursor on a screen. Losing your line is the single most expensive accident in this test.
4. If you do lose the line, restart at the beginning of the current line. Do not hunt for where you were. Re-scanning a few clusters you have already done is cheap; panic is not.
5. Mark cleanly and move. A firm, small mark. Scribbles that could be read as two marks or none are an unnecessary way to lose points.
6. Hold the same pace in part five as part one. Do not bank effort early and do not sprint at the end. Flat is the profile you want.

Where people lose it

• Going back to check. The most common and most expensive habit. You have already made the judgement; a re-check costs two groups and changes your mind roughly never.
• Wobbling after an error. You spot a five you marked two lines ago. Let it go. The recovery spiral — slow down, doubt, speed up, make three more — costs far more than the original mistake.
• Racing the last twenty seconds. A flurry of marks at the end of a part is where false positives come from, and they are subtracted from a score you had already earned.
• Treating the parts as a fresh start. They are one profile. Two strong parts and three ragged ones reads worse than five even ones.
• Practising untimed. Untimed practice teaches you the rule, which you already knew after thirty seconds. Only timed practice teaches you the pace.

How to practise it

• Every day, briefly. Two parts is a useful session. This is a skill that responds to frequency, not to hour-long grinds.
• Sit the full five parts twice a week, timed, on the largest screen you have, and write down both numbers afterwards.
• Watch errors first, marks second. If your errors are climbing, you are past your pace. Pull back until they flatten, then push again.
• Practise at the wrong time of day, once. If your assessment is at four in the afternoon, find out what your four-in-the-afternoon score looks like.

If you also see SCAAT

Some operators use the Safe Concentration and Attention Test instead. It is a different surface over the same skill, and everything above transfers without modification: one direction, no revisiting, shapes over counting, flat pace. Practise Group Bourdon and you are practising both.

Next, the test that runs the same concentration skill while something else is happening: TEA-Occ.