A Strategy for the E-tray

First, some terminology:

• CBT - Computer based test
• Question - the big scenario with the three options
• Option - The three items you need to evaluate (from -- to ++)

The E-tray looks like a SJT, but has some major differences:

• You need to remember that each option has its own merit an evaluates a different competency.
• The context is given by all the emails, not per question
• Sometimes you have conflicting information

The test time is split in two parts:

• 3 minutes for instructions and
• 50 minutes for the test itself.

The strategy employed is derived from this timing.

Instructions

Use the three minutes to read the instructions and extract relevant facts and figures, e.g.:

• Deadlines (if any)
• Your role
• Important numbers (if any)

Write also the four competencies in a table:

You can mark a "+" next to a competency each time you use that competency in evaluating an option. The point of this exercise is to gauge the usage of competencies; throughout the exercise [e.g. after answering half of the questions], try to balance the usage of competencies, knowing that all are measured out of 10.

Questions

If you have good memory, you can read and comprehend all questions in one go and, afterword, answer each question. Thing is, sometimes you get contradictory information, so it's better to put some notes down. In 10 (max 15) minutes, you need to scan all emails and extract the following information in a table:

where:

• No - the number of the email
• Name - the subject of the email
• Sender - the sender - when you evaluate, note the organisation and rank
• Date - the date of the email - in case they're not chronologically ordered already
• Content - keywords

The only significant work you need to do is extracting the keywords. For this, you need to scan the email and see if it has more content than what's in the subject. E.g. an email about a summary including some information about an absence. Normally, the emails should be relatively short and scanning them should take less than 30s/email.

Answering

You'll have 40 [or 35] minutes to answer the 18 x 3 = 54 options. The approach is as follows:

1. Evaluate the scenario and identify the topic
2. Identify the emails relevant to that topic (the "Content" column)
3. Read the relevant emails
4. Evaluate the questions:
   1. Rank in relative order to each other based on the available information (e.g. BCA)
   2. Assess the ++ ... -- for the option based on competencies

Assessment is usually tricky. Rank them from the most positive to the most negative. For each competency relevant to the option, you should ask yourself if it's accomplished by the option. If you "tick" all competencies for the most positive answer, then you can rank it as a ++. if your best option is actually not a solution for a competency, you'll need to rank it as a + or a +/- (neutral).

Note: This is an old post I wrote in 2015 and may or may not be relevant today