Citadel
Citadel Dual Online Assessment - Free Timed Practice
Two screens Citadel candidates report, run back to back. A 50-item cognitive test at fourteen seconds an item, then a 15-item probability OA covering combinatorics, Bayes, Markov chains and hypothesis testing. They are different time-pressure problems: the first rewards triage, the second rewards a clean setup.
Format
- 2 sections · 65 items · about 42 minutes
- No negative marking - answer everything.
- No going back. Answer or skip, and the next item loads.
- Every sitting is generated fresh - a retake is a new paper.
Sections
- Cognitive screen - 50 items, 12 minutes, no negative marking. 50 items in 12 minutes: arithmetic, logic, letter series, odd-one-out, and two-sentence comprehension. Fourteen seconds a question.
- Probability OA - 15 items, 30 minutes, no negative marking. 15 items in 30 minutes: extended Bayes, Markov chains, combinatorics, EV, a stopping game, and one hypothesis-testing question.
What this sitting is
Two screens Citadel candidates report, run back to back. A 50-item cognitive test at fourteen seconds an item, then a 15-item probability OA covering combinatorics, Bayes, Markov chains and hypothesis testing. They are different time-pressure problems: the first rewards triage, the second rewards a clean setup.
2 sections, 65 items, about 42 minutes end to end, on a clock that does not stop between sections. Every question is generated fresh, so sitting it twice gives you two different papers and there is nothing to memorise between attempts.
How it is marked
No section marks negatively. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you would have earned, so there is never a reason to leave an item blank.
There is no going back anywhere in the paper. You answer or skip, and the next item loads, so every decision to leave something is final at the moment you make it.
Section by section, with a worked example
Every example below is generated by Outcry, drawn from the same generator that section runs during the timed sitting. None of it is Citadel's own material.
A. Cognitive screen
50 items in 12 minutes: arithmetic, logic, letter series, odd-one-out, and two-sentence comprehension. Fourteen seconds a question.
50 items in 12 minutes, which is about 14 seconds an item. No penalty for a wrong answer here, so answer everything.
Example 1
18 × 11 − 81
Answer 117
18 × 11 = 198; 198 − 81 = 117.
Example 2
What letter comes next: A, C, E, G, ...?
- I
- H
- K
- J
Answer I
Every second letter of the alphabet: next is I.
B. Probability OA
15 items in 30 minutes: extended Bayes, Markov chains, combinatorics, EV, a stopping game, and one hypothesis-testing question.
15 items in 30 minutes, which is about 2 minutes an item. No penalty for a wrong answer here, so answer everything.
Example 1
Cards are dealt one at a time from a shuffled standard deck. Before each card you may call "red" - you win if that card is red, and the game ends. If you never call, the last card decides. What is your best possible probability of winning?
- It grows with patience
- 27/52
- 26/51
- 1/2
Answer 1/2
A martingale argument: whatever the strategy, the proportion of reds remaining is a martingale, so every stopping rule wins with exactly 1/2. No timing edge exists.
Example 2
A token starts at position 1 on the integers 0 to 4. Each step it moves left or right with probability 1/2, and positions 0 and 4 absorb. What is the expected number of steps until absorption?
- 3
- 5
- 4
- 6
Answer 3
E[steps] from i is i(N−i) - the martingale Sₙ²−n stopped at the boundary: 1·3 = 3.
Common questions
- How long is Citadel Dual Online Assessment?
- About 42 minutes across 2 sections, 65 items in total, with the clock running continuously between them.
- Is there negative marking?
- No section marks negatively. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you would have earned, so there is never a reason to leave an item blank.
- Can I go back to an earlier question?
- There is no going back anywhere in the paper. You answer or skip, and the next item loads, so every decision to leave something is final at the moment you make it.
- Are the questions the same every time?
- No. Every item is generated from the archetype bank the format draws on, so the shape of the paper is fixed and the numbers are not. Two attempts are two different papers.
- Is this Citadel's real assessment?
- No. Outcry is not affiliated with Citadel and has no access to their questions. This sitting reproduces a publicly reported format - the item counts, the timings and the marking rules - and generates every question itself.
Outcry is not affiliated with Citadel and has no access to their assessment content. This sitting reproduces a publicly reported format; every question is generated by Outcry.