Preparing for the Multicheck: what really helps and what costs money without helping

The most useful piece of information on this subject sits on the test provider’s own site, and it is rarely quoted: gateway.one does not recommend a paid preparation course. Instead the provider advises revising the school material of the 8. Klasse and using its own free practice tool. So anyone wanting to know whether a course costing several hundred francs is worth it finds the first answer with the party that builds the test and sells no course.

What is being prepared for here

If you have recently moved to Switzerland, the setting is worth a paragraph. Around 15 or 16, at the end of lower secondary school, most young people here apply for a Lehre, an apprenticeship: three or four years leading to the federal EFZ qualification, or two years leading to the EBA, combining paid work in a company, the Lehrbetrieb, with one or two days of vocational school a week. It is the route most Swiss school leavers take and it is not a fallback for weaker pupils, since it leads to protected professions and, through the Berufsmaturität, on to the universities of applied sciences and via the Passerelle exam to the regular universities.

Applications go to companies, like job applications, and many companies ask for an aptitude test certificate alongside the school report. The Multicheck is that certificate. It is a commercial product from gateway solutions ag, trading as gateway.one, booked and paid for by the applicant and sat at a test centre under supervision. It is not a school exam, which is why no teacher can tell you what will be in it and why the provider is the only authority on how to prepare.

The 8. Klasse referred to throughout is the second-to-last year of compulsory lower secondary school, with pupils aged roughly 14. It is the curriculum level the test is built on. Note also that education in Switzerland is a cantonal matter, so whether the school does anything at all around these tests depends on where you live. The test itself is the same in every canton.

What the official free tool contains

At gateway.one/vorbereiten there is a free preparation tool. According to the provider it contains the test’s real instructions including the real sample questions, plus a handful of realistic practice questions per subject area. It covers mathematics, German, logic and concentration. You can work through the tool as often as you like and at your own pace.

The provider states the purpose with restraint: the preparation is meant to help you go into the test more confidently and to know how the assessment is built. There is no statement there that practice improves the result. That restraint is itself a piece of information.

What the tool does not reproduce

Three things are missing from the practice tool, and all three matter. First the time: in the tool you work at your own pace, in the test the clock runs. Second the volume: the real test contains considerably more questions. Third the range: difficulty varies more in the test than in the sample questions.

Past test papers are not published. If somebody offers you “the real Multicheck questions”, they did not come from the provider. What such collections actually contain cannot be checked from outside, and the price for them is in every case entirely avoidable.

Why time pressure is the real difference

A percentage calculation you have two unhurried minutes for is a different task from the same sum with forty seconds. In the first case it tests whether you know the method. In the second it also tests how quickly you grasp the task, how many intermediate steps you hold in your head at once, and whether you stay calm when the two questions before did not work out.

From that follows the one practice rule that really counts: practise with a stopwatch. Twenty minutes of sums with the clock running is worth more than an hour at leisure. Practise only without a time limit and you are training for a situation that does not occur on the day.

What can be trained and what cannot

The fourth row deserves a comment, because that is where most of the promises are aimed. Anyone who practises figural items gets better at them quickly, and the reason is at first mundane: after twenty questions you know what you are looking for and lose less time working out what is being asked. Whether the underlying ability rises beyond that is an open question, and we are not aware of any publicly available study that answers it for the Multicheck. So we claim nothing in either direction.

A four-week plan that costs nothing

The plan deliberately contains no material that costs anything. The school book is already at home, the practice tool is free, and the factual text is in any newspaper. Anyone who wants to do more should lengthen weeks 2 and 3 rather than fill week 4 with new material.

The last few days and the day itself

Two nights before the appointment is the more important night, not the last one: people who sleep badly before an important day have usually built the compensation in two days earlier. On the day the routine is the one you know from exams. Have breakfast, leave with time in hand, take the identity document, and do not try to learn something new that morning.

During the test, one decision helps more than any preparation: getting stuck costs more than skipping. If a question is not within reach after twenty seconds, move to the next. Unanswered questions score zero, but a question you spend three minutes stuck on costs you the four questions after it as well.

The three most common mistakes when practising

The first mistake is practising without a clock. It is widespread because it feels good: worked out at leisure, nearly everything is right. On the day it turns out that the questions were not the problem, the pace was.

The second mistake is preferring to practise what already works. Someone who likes the mathematics section does mathematics for three weeks and leaves the German section alone, even though there is more to be gained there. That is why week 1 of the plan above carries an apparently minor instruction: note which area felt worst. Precisely that area then belongs in the plan twice a week.

The third mistake is starting too late and then wanting too much. Four weeks at twenty minutes a day work better than two weekends of six hours each, for a simple reason: the spread-out version comes closer to the conditions under which the material has to be retrieved in the test.

What parents can contribute and what they cannot

A good share of the searches on this subject come not from young people but from parents. The useful contribution is logistics: put the appointment at a distance from the application deadline, do the journey once beforehand, ask the training company about a voucher, and in week 4 make sure nobody unpacks new material in the evening.

Pressure is not useful. An aptitude test measures a section on a single day, and that section reacts sensitively to tension. Anyone who hears the night before that their future depends on it carries an extra load into the test that makes not one question easier. The sober truth helps more at this point: the certificate is one part of the application, and at many companies the Schnupperlehre, the taster placement, is the more important part.

What preparation courses promise, and what of it is documented

Around Swiss aptitude tests there is a market of courses, training platforms and question collections. The promises resemble each other: more points, better chances, confidence on the day. What is missing is a traceable measurement.

We are not aware of any publicly available study measuring the effect of a paid preparation course on a Multicheck result. That gap is the reason no figure stands here: an invented one would be worse than none. If you are considering a course, put three questions to the provider. How did you measure the effect? Compared with which group? How many participants were there? An answer that consists of testimonials is not a measurement.

And keep in mind what the test provider itself writes about such courses in its own FAQ. In the German original the sentence reads “Sie werden nicht von uns durchgeführt und kosten oft viel Geld”, which is to say: they are not run by us and often cost a lot of money. The provider points instead to the school material of the 8. Klasse and to its own free preparation tool, and it expressly claims no improvement in results, only more confidence with the procedure. That is a strong statement precisely because of who is making it.

The second attempt as a practice strategy is a trap

One suggestion turns up in forums regularly: sit the first Multicheck as a practice run and do it properly the second time. That ends badly. Within one test period, two attempts per occupational field are possible, and the second attempt is noted on the certificate. The training company sees that note. A practice run therefore uses up one of the two attempts and makes the note likely, and it costs a further CHF 60 to CHF 100.

Anyone who wants to avoid the note has to spread the two attempts across different test periods and leave at least three months between them. An abandoned test also counts as an attempt. The details on repeats and deadlines are in the overview of versions and prices.

Why no course is sold here

This site does not offer a preparation course, neither for the Multicheck nor for the Basic Check, and is not planning one. That is not modesty, it is the precondition for the section on courses above being worth anything at all. Anyone who tells you what preparation achieves and sells you preparation in the same breath is answering a different question from the one you asked.

What exists here is a free test with a detailed evaluation report you can buy if you want it. The test itself stays free, report or no report.

If you want to practise the item format at no cost

For the school-material part of the Multicheck, the 8. Klasse school book is the better material, and the official practice tool is unbeatable for the instructions, because they are the real ones. For the logic section there is a third option that costs nothing: items of the same type in different packaging.

Our free test consists of 30 items in 25 minutes, among them figural matrices, number sequences and deductive items. Those are the same demands that sit in the logic and concentration part of an aptitude test: recognise a pattern, name the rule behind it, apply it to a new case while the clock runs. It gives an orientation value, not an aptitude certificate, and it does not replace the Multicheck. How these items are built and how to spot the rule is set out in understanding matrix reasoning. Which test is the right one for your situation at all is settled in the overview of aptitude tests for an apprenticeship.