Aptitude tests › McKinsey Solve
McKinsey Solve: what the game looks at, and what practice can do
Solve is the assessment game McKinsey uses when it recruits consultants. You work through tasks on screen, and McKinsey says no preparation is needed. This page sets out what McKinsey says, what the one published study behind the game measured, and three kinds of practice question for the same kinds of thinking. They are not the game, and the last section says what that means.
What McKinsey says
| What it is | A gamified assessment, made to show your problem-solving abilities |
|---|---|
| Tasks | Each task starts with an untimed tutorial that explains its objective and how to move around it. No business knowledge or gaming experience is needed |
| Variation | Each scenario varies, so no two candidates get the same parameters and combinations of data |
| Time | Given in your invitation email |
| Device | A PC or Mac only, not an iPad or phone. A tech check runs first. Sound is not needed and a mouse is optional |
| Languages | English, Spanish, Portuguese or Japanese |
| Rules | No apps, websites, AI tools or prepared notes, no screenshots or recordings, and no help from anyone else. You may be asked at random to do another task in person or to explain your logic |
| How it counts | Your result is weighed with the rest of your application and any other assessments, not on its own |
| Preparing | McKinsey says no preparation is needed: approach it with curiosity and creativity |
What the research behind it measured
The game was built by Imbellus, with McKinsey. In a 2018 paper, its designers describe a pilot with 527 McKinsey candidates in London, who played three scenarios in 60 minutes after taking McKinsey's paper Problem Solving Test.
- What it scores: how people work, not only the final answer. Every click and hover is recorded, and scores are built from the pattern.
- Five areas: critical thinking, decision-making, metacognition (keeping track of your own thinking), situational awareness and systems thinking.
- How it related to the paper test: each area's score correlated with passing the Problem Solving Test (0.43 to 0.71). The scores were partly built to predict that result, so this shows the two agree, not that the game predicts work.
Practice for the same kinds of thinking
preplaud's questions are its own, set in shops, hospitals, schools, workshops and festivals. Three of them practise the kinds of thinking the game asks for:
- Research case: a short scenario, a few facts and a table or chart. Pick out what you need, ignore what you don't, calculate, and decide which option meets the target. The guide has a routine.
- Pick a set: choose the items that meet several rules at once, the best set among those that do, or the one swap that fixes a set that doesn't. The guide shows how to apply the hardest rule first and cross out.
- Supply chains: a stated process runs step by step over the members you choose. Work out who is left short, which one change keeps everyone supplied, or which set does best. The guide shows how to run it on paper.
- Also useful: data tables and charts for reading figures quickly, and the planning puzzles for thinking a few moves ahead.
What practice can and cannot do
- It makes the thinking familiar. Pulling the right numbers out of a scenario, and working through rules without missing one, get quicker with practice. On the day, you can spend your attention on the task, not on how to start.
- It is not the game. Solve is a game with its own screens, and it scores how you work as well as what you choose. Multiple-choice and typed questions can't copy that, and preplaud makes no claim that practice raises a Solve result.
- McKinsey says you don't need to prepare. If you practise, do it for comfort with the thinking, not to learn tricks for a particular task. The scenarios vary from person to person.
- Practise before, never during. McKinsey's rules forbid websites, apps, AI tools and notes while you take Solve. That includes this site.
- Watch McKinsey's video and do each tutorial carefully. They are McKinsey's own guides to the real tasks, and the tutorials are untimed.
Start now
Sources
- McKinsey: Solve, McKinsey's assessment game (what it is, no preparation needed, rules, the video)
- McKinsey: Solve FAQs, August 2025 (tutorials, variation, time, device, languages, rules, how results are used)
- Kantar, McNulty, Snow et al. (2018), Constructing cognitive profiles for simulation-based hiring assessments, Educational Data Mining 2018 (the pilot, the five areas, the correlations)