The Israeli psychometric exam, explained

Updated

The psychometric exam, the בחינה הפסיכומטרית in Hebrew, is the entrance exam for Israeli universities. The מרכז ארצי לבחינות והערכה (National Institute for Testing and Evaluation) runs it.

If you know the SAT or the ACT, the idea will feel closer than A-levels or a subject exam. It is not a school-leaving exam, and it does not test one subject. It is an aptitude test, and you prepare for it as one.

It does not replace the בגרות (bagrut), the Israeli matriculation exam. It comes on top of it. Universities calculate a combined score from the two.

How the exam is built

The exam starts with an essay: 30 minutes in Hebrew, 35 minutes in the other languages, French included. Then come eight chapters of 20 minutes each. Each chapter belongs to one of three areas:

Plan for about three and a half hours in total, with no break. All questions are multiple choice, and calculators are not allowed. You get a formula sheet at the start of the quantitative part.

The two chapters that do not count

Many candidates learn this only after the exam: two of the eight chapters do not count toward the score. Only six count, two for each area.

One of the two calibrates the exam against earlier sessions. The other tries out new questions. Nothing marks them during the exam, and you cannot guess which ones they are.

This has a practical consequence, and it helps to know it before exam day. If a chapter feels unusually hard, that tells you nothing. It may be one of the two unscored chapters, or it may not. Either way, the only sensible reaction is to treat it like the others and draw no conclusion for the rest of the exam. Candidates who lose heart on a hard chapter often lose the next two chapters as well, and those may count.

The score

The general score runs from 200 to 800. It comes with a sub-score for each area, so some programs can weight them differently. A science faculty looks more closely at the quantitative score, and a law or communications program at the verbal one.

The university then combines this score with the bagrut average to make the combined score, and the combined score decides admission. Each university, and often each faculty, publishes its own threshold and its own weighting formula. The same score of 650 can open one door and not another.

So there is no "good score" in absolute terms. The useful question is not "how much do I need?" It is "what threshold did my chosen program publish this year?"

Taking it in French

The exam exists in several languages, French among them, and the score is exactly the same whichever version you choose. The French version is not an accommodation or a lighter exam. It is the same exam.

One thing is worth knowing, though. The French version is translated from the Hebrew, and some wording keeps traces of the original. These are not mistakes. They are turns of phrase: a way of putting a question, the order of a clause, a negation placed where a native French sentence would not put it. You recognize them quickly when you have practiced on French papers, and they slow you down when you meet the French version for the first time on exam day.

So a candidate who prepares in Hebrew and then sits the French version faces both difficulties at once. If you decide to take the exam in French, prepare in French.

The English part is not translated. It is in English in every version.

The real difficulty is not the level of math

The National Institute puts the quantitative syllabus at the level of the lowest math bagrut, the 3-unit level: fractions, percentages, powers and roots, equations, averages, counting and probability, plane geometry, and a few solids (box, cylinder, cone, prism, pyramid). An adult who went through ordinary schooling has already met almost everything on it.

The problem lies elsewhere: twenty minutes for twenty questions. That is one minute per question, reading included, without a calculator.

At that pace, the school method works against you. Setting up the equation, solving it neatly and checking it gives the right answer, and costs you the next question. The scoring does not reward rigor. It rewards pace. What you train is not calculation. It is recognizing patterns, and the shortcut that avoids the calculation.

That is also why preparation pays off faster than people expect. You do not make up years of mathematics. You learn to see in three seconds that a question can be solved in your head.

elev's preparation is here. It is in French.

When to take it, and how many times

There are several sessions each year. You can retake the exam as many times as you like, including at two sessions in a row, but only once per session. In most cases, universities keep your best score. Check this with the university you are aiming for: if it does, retaking cannot hurt you.

Two pieces of advice follow from this rule:

  1. Do not aim for the nearest session just because it is the nearest. A score taken too early costs you only the registration fee, but it can set a psychological floor that is hard to get past.
  2. Look at the registration calendar before the exam calendar. Registration closes several weeks ahead, and not every language is necessarily offered at every session. Check which sessions offer the version you want.

Dates, fees, rules and official past papers are published by the National Institute for Testing and Evaluation.