Gamified assessment
The Arctic Shores Task-Based Assessment
Arctic Shores is a task-based behavioural assessment built from short, game-style tasks rather than questions. It measures how you naturally work, not what you have revised, and produces a strengths profile with no traditional pass or fail. Here is what each task is reading and how to prepare your mindset for it.
In short
The Arctic Shores Task-Based Assessment is a short, game-style behavioural test made up of interactive tasks rather than questions. It measures how you work, including your resilience, learning agility, risk approach and decision-making, rather than what you know, and it produces a strengths profile with no traditional pass or fail. You cannot revise for it, but you can prepare your mindset: understand the behaviours it captures, be well rested, read each task brief carefully, and play consistently to your natural style.
The basics
What it is
Arctic Shores is a UK-founded assessment company whose flagship product is the Task-Based Assessment, sometimes just called the Arctic Shores assessment or, in older processes, a game-based assessment. Instead of multiple-choice questions, you complete a series of short interactive tasks on screen. There are no right or wrong answers in the usual sense; the assessment watches how you behave inside each task and builds a picture of your natural working style.
The design philosophy is to measure how you work rather than what you already know. Because the tasks do not rely on academic knowledge, prior experience or rehearsed answers, employers use Arctic Shores to screen for potential and to reduce the bias that can creep into CV-led sifting. That makes it popular for graduate, apprentice and other early-career hiring, where firms want to compare a large and varied applicant pool fairly.
In the UK and US it is used by large early-careers recruiters, most notably KPMG, which pairs the Arctic Shores task-based assessment with a Cappfinity-style immersive exercise in its application journey. The Arctic Shores stage typically comes early, often soon after you apply, and feeds a behavioural profile that recruiters read alongside the later immersive and interview stages.
You take it remotely on your own device, usually in around 20 to 35 minutes. Each task starts with a short brief and often a practice round, so you know what to do before it counts. The tasks feel like simple games, such as balancing speed against accuracy, learning a hidden rule, or deciding how much risk to take for a reward, but each one is grounded in established behavioural-science measures rather than being arbitrary.
It helps to know what Arctic Shores is not. It is not a knowledge test, so there is no syllabus to cram, and it is not a video game you can be good or bad at in the way you might be at a console title. You do not need fast thumbs or gaming experience; the tasks use simple clicks, taps and choices. The most common surprise for candidates is realising that polished, deliberate answers are not the goal, because the assessment is reading patterns of behaviour across many rounds, not a single clever move.
Intervyo builds original, independent recreations of task-based assessments like this one so you can rehearse the formats and understand what each task is reading. We are not affiliated with Arctic Shores, and our practice tasks are our own design, intended to remove the surprise factor and help you arrive calm, familiar with the controls, and ready to behave like yourself.
Try it now
Try the Arctic Shores Task-Based Assessment format
An app-identical practice test and report. Free to start, no card required.
What it measures
The dimensions under test
Resilience and effort
How you respond when a task gets harder or you hit a setback. The assessment looks at whether you keep going, recover after a near miss, and sustain effort, rather than at any single score in a round.
Learning agility and adaptability
How quickly you pick up a new rule from feedback and adjust when conditions change mid-task. Tasks often shift the rules deliberately to see how readily you update your approach instead of sticking to what worked before.
Risk approach
How you weigh reward against the chance of losing it. Some tasks ask you to decide when to push for more and when to bank what you have, revealing whether you lean cautious, balanced or bold under uncertainty.
Decision-making and processing
The speed-versus-accuracy trade-off you naturally strike, plus attention and working memory. It captures whether you act fast and loose, slow and careful, or sensibly adapt your pace to what each task rewards.
Problem-solving and fluid reasoning
How you spot patterns and work out the underlying logic of a task from limited examples, then apply that logic accurately to new situations as the task develops.
Drive and motivation style
What you do when nothing is forcing you to continue: whether you seek out extra reward, settle quickly for a safe outcome, or pace yourself steadily across the whole assessment.
The format
What to expect
See it in action
A worked example
Here is a representative task in the style Arctic Shores uses. It is our own illustration rather than a real item, but it shows how a task can measure your approach instead of a right answer.
- 01
The brief
You are shown a container you can inflate to earn points. Every time you add to it the points on offer rise, but so does the chance it bursts and you lose that round's points. You can bank what you have at any moment.
- 02
Early rounds
You make a few attempts and start to sense how far you can push before things go wrong. The assessment is already noting how you calibrate and whether you learn from each outcome rather than repeating the same move.
- 03
The pressure point
After a burst, do you pull back sharply, carry on as before, or chase the loss by pushing harder? After a big win, do you get bolder? These reactions reveal your genuine risk approach, not a target number.
- 04
Across the set
The task repeats for many rounds. What matters is the pattern across all of them, not any single round, so a consistent strategy reads more clearly than erratic swings.
- 05
No target
There is no ideal number of inflations. A steady, slightly cautious player and a steady, bold player both produce clean, readable profiles; an inconsistent player produces a noisier one.
The takeaway
The task is not asking you to maximise points. It is reading how you handle uncertainty and feedback, so the best approach is to settle on a genuine strategy and apply it consistently rather than trying to guess a winning number.
The scoring
How it is marked
Arctic Shores does not produce a single mark out of 100. It builds a profile across the behaviours it measures, and each employer decides which behaviours matter for the role and how to weight them. Your result is best thought of as a match against the role rather than a grade, though some firms set a threshold on chosen behaviours to help sift larger applicant pools.
Strong match
Your profile closely reflects the behaviours the role rewards, for example resilience and learning agility for a demanding graduate scheme. Candidates here typically progress to the next stage.
Good match
You meet the key behaviours the employer is screening for, even if not every one. This usually advances you, sometimes read alongside how you perform at later stages.
Mixed or developing match
You are strong on some behaviours and lighter on others. The outcome depends heavily on how the employer weights each behaviour for that specific role.
Lower match
Your profile diverges from what the role rewards. At firms that set a behavioural threshold this can end the application, though many, including KPMG, treat the result as one input among several.
The variants
Versions you might be sent
Task-Based Assessment (behavioural)
The flagship and most common version: the suite of short interactive tasks that build a behavioural strengths profile. This is the one most graduate applicants, including those at KPMG, will sit.
Task-based cognitive tasks
Some employers add interactive tasks that measure aptitude, such as numerical, verbal or abstract reasoning, delivered as tasks rather than traditional multiple-choice tests. These capture problem-solving alongside behaviour.
Legacy game-based assessment
Earlier Arctic Shores processes used a downloadable, game-style app with named mini-games. Most employers have since moved to the browser-based Task-Based Assessment, but you may still see references to the older game-based format.
Employer-configured profiles
Firms can choose which behaviours are weighted most heavily for a given role, so the same underlying tasks can be scored differently for, say, a client-facing graduate scheme versus a technical one.
Who uses it
Firms that screen with this test
Each links to a dedicated firm guide: the application process, the interview stages, and what they look for.
The prep
How to prepare
Understand the behaviours, not the answers
You cannot revise content, but you can learn what the assessment measures: resilience, learning agility, risk approach and decision style. Knowing this lets you engage with each task purposefully instead of guessing what is wanted.
Rehearse the task formats
The biggest disadvantage is unfamiliarity. Practising task-style exercises beforehand means the controls and goals feel natural on the day, so your behaviour reflects how you really work rather than how flustered you are by a new interface.
Be rested and remove distractions
Several tasks are sensitive to attention, timing and working memory, all of which drop when you are tired or interrupted. Treat it like a performance: quiet room, good device, full focus, and a stable connection.
Read each brief and use the practice round
Every task tells you the goal and usually lets you try it first. Use that to lock in the controls and the rules before it counts, so you do not waste your first scored rounds working out what to do.
Play consistently and authentically
Because employers match you to a role profile, trying to fake a single trait tends to produce an inconsistent, weaker profile. Settle on a genuine strategy for each task and keep it steady across all the rounds.
Practise on the real format
Reading about the test is not practising it.
Intervyo recreates Arctic Shores Task-Based Assessment in its real format, timed and scored, with instant feedback so the structure is familiar before it counts. Start free, no card required.
FAQ
Common questions
It is a task-based behavioural assessment made up of short, game-style tasks rather than questions. Instead of testing knowledge, it watches how you behave inside each task to measure traits such as resilience, learning agility and risk approach, then builds a strengths profile that employers use to screen candidates fairly.
Keep exploring
Keep going
Practise on Intervyo
Arctic Shores Task-Based Assessment
Know the test.
Now practise it on the real format.
Intervyo recreates the timed pressure of these assessments and scores every run, so the format is second nature before the real one.
Free to start, no card required
Intervyo is an independent preparation platform. Our practice tests simulate the style and format of Arctic Shores assessments and are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the test publisher.