Updated April 2026 · Unbiased breakdown of what each platform actually does
GraduatesFirst is a UK-based aptitude test preparation platform founded by former assessment-industry psychometricians, including Kenexa alumni. It positions itself as a premium preparation service with tests written by the same people who design real assessments. It offers employer-specific prep for 150+ UK graduate employers and provides practice tests to over 150 UK universities.
TestSolve is an AI-powered aptitude test practice tool. You practise with real-format questions, press F8, and receive the answer and reasoning on your phone. It's built for candidates who want instant, worked explanations while they practise.
GraduatesFirst is a practice test platform. You pay for access to a library of mock tests designed to help you improve your skills before your assessment.
| Feature | TestSolve | GraduatesFirst |
|---|---|---|
| Written by real test psychometricians | AI trained on real assessment data | ✓ Former industry experts |
| Employer-specific content (150+) | ✓ Covers 200+ companies | ✓ 150+ UK employers |
| University partnerships | ✗ N/A | ✓ 150+ UK university partners |
| Subscription model | $14.99 for 30 questions | £19.99–£29.99/month |
| Kenexa Infinity coverage | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Cappfinity coverage | ✓ EY, Deloitte, HSBC, Accenture | ✓ Multiple employers |
| Real-time test assistance | ✓ Real-time answers | ✗ Not offered |
| Video interview prep | Not offered | ✓ Extensive video interview guides |
| TestSolve | GraduatesFirst | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes — free solve, no card required | Yes — free registration with some tests included |
| Paid plan | From $14.99 for 30 questions · no subscription | Monthly membership £19.99–£29.99 · Annual plans available |
| Per-test pricing | Per-question pricing · no subscription | Subscription model — access to full library |
Psychometrician-authored questions: GraduatesFirst's tests are written by former assessment-industry test developers, including Kenexa alumni — people who designed real assessments. This is genuine expertise, not AI-generated approximations, and results in higher fidelity practice questions.
University-validated: GraduatesFirst is integrated into career services at over 150 UK universities. The platform is widely trusted by careers advisors and students alike — it has institutional credibility that newer platforms lack.
Strong employer coverage for UK market: For UK-specific employers — Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, British Army, NHS, Civil Service — GraduatesFirst's employer-specific preparation is detailed and regularly updated.
Subscription value: Unlike JobTestPrep's per-pack model, GraduatesFirst's subscription gives full library access — useful for candidates applying to multiple employers simultaneously.
Premium price for a practice tool: At £19.99–£29.99 per month, GraduatesFirst is 2-3x the price of TestSolve's per-question pricing from $14.99.
Practice-to-performance gap: Even psychometrician-authored practice questions cannot replicate the exact item bank of the real assessment — most providers generate a randomised instance for every candidate, so no practice question will ever appear verbatim in your actual test.
GraduatesFirst is arguably the highest quality aptitude test preparation platform in the UK market, with genuinely expert-authored content and strong institutional backing. For candidates with 2–4 weeks to prepare and who want the most rigorous preparation available, GraduatesFirst is excellent. TestSolve is the faster complement for instant, worked explanations while you practise.
For candidates who want to build their aptitude test skills over time — who have weeks to prepare and want a large practice library — GraduatesFirst is a strong option. For candidates who want fast, worked explanations while they practise a specific format, TestSolve is the more direct tool. Many candidates use both: GraduatesFirst to build familiarity with question formats, and TestSolve for instant explanations along the way.
GraduatesFirst gives you foundational practice with explanations. TestSolve provides real-time AI answers on test day. The two platforms are complementary rather than competing.
The pedigree GraduatesFirst leans on — questions written by people who used to design assessments for a living, rather than generated content — is a genuine differentiator worth taking seriously. A test developer who has worked inside the actual industry understands the subtle design choices that make a real numerical reasoning item harder than it looks (a deliberately ambiguous unit, a distractor answer calibrated to catch a specific common mistake), and that expertise shows up in higher-fidelity practice material than a generic question bank produces.
Where this strength runs into a hard limit is the practice-to-performance gap that exists for every prep platform, GraduatesFirst included: the actual assessment you sit will be a different, randomised instance of the test, generated from the live provider's own item bank, not a rehearsed copy of anything you practised beforehand. Expert-authored practice builds genuine skill and pattern recognition — it's simply never going to be the literal same questions you face on the day, which is exactly the gap a real-time answer tool is built to close instead.
If you're weeks out from your assessment and have genuine time to build skill from the ground up, GraduatesFirst's structured, expert-authored practice library is a strong investment — its subscription model rewards sustained use across that longer runway, and its university career-service integration means many candidates already have institutional access worth checking before paying out of pocket. If your assessment is days away, or you're already mid-way through a live test and need an answer to the specific question in front of you right now, that's the exact moment GraduatesFirst's model — built for study over time — isn't designed to help, and a real-time tool fills that different, narrower need instead.
GraduatesFirst's integration into careers services at over 150 UK universities is a real, checkable credential — but it's worth understanding precisely what it does and doesn't mean for your own preparation. It means the platform has been vetted by careers professionals at those institutions and is trusted enough to be recommended or even licensed directly to students, which is a meaningful quality signal in a market with plenty of lower-quality competitors. It does not mean the specific practice questions are pulled from, or identical to, any particular employer's actual assessment — no legitimate prep platform can claim that, since test providers like SHL, Kenexa, and Cubiks keep their live item banks proprietary and don't license them out to third-party prep sites. If your university offers GraduatesFirst access as part of its careers service, that's worth checking before paying for a personal subscription, since many students already have this covered without an additional cost.
Both GraduatesFirst and TestSolve maintain employer-specific guides, but they serve different purposes within your preparation. GraduatesFirst's employer-specific practice packs are built around replicating the actual test provider and format a given employer uses as closely as their licensing allows — genuinely useful for building targeted skill on the specific question types you'll face. TestSolve's employer-specific content instead focuses on the full hiring process context — what stages come before and after the aptitude test, what pass marks or percentile thresholds are typically applied, and what the interview and assessment-centre stages that follow actually look like — alongside the instant-answer tool itself for the test stage specifically. Candidates preparing for a specific employer's full process, rather than just the aptitude test in isolation, often find value in checking both types of resource rather than treating them as substitutes for each other.
A candidate with genuine lead time — say three to four weeks before an assessment — might reasonably start with GraduatesFirst's structured practice library to build baseline familiarity with the specific question formats their target employer uses, working through timed sets regularly to build both accuracy and speed over that period. In the final week, as the practice library becomes less about building new skill and more about fine-tuning, switching focus to live, realistic practice with an instant-answer tool available for the specific questions that still trip you up closes the loop — you're no longer building from zero, you're polishing specific weak spots with immediate, worked feedback rather than working through a general study sequence that may no longer match your actual remaining gaps.
Candidates with much less runway — a matter of days rather than weeks — generally get more value front-loading the instant-answer approach from the start, since there simply isn't time to work through a structured multi-week study library before the actual test date arrives. In that compressed timeline, understanding the format quickly and then practising directly against realistic questions with immediate explanations tends to produce more usable improvement per hour invested than starting a longer structured programme you won't have time to finish. Neither approach is inherently better in the abstract — the right choice is simply whichever one actually matches how much time you genuinely have left before your test date, rather than which platform has the more impressive credentials on paper. Being honest with yourself about your actual remaining runway, rather than the runway you wish you had, is the single most useful input into this decision.
Because GraduatesFirst's subscription pricing sits meaningfully above TestSolve's per-question model, it's worth actually checking whether you already have free or discounted access before comparing sticker prices directly. Many UK universities license GraduatesFirst for their students as part of a broader careers-service package, sometimes without prominently advertising it — a quick check with your university's careers office, or a look at their careers-portal login options, can turn what looks like a genuine cost-versus-cost comparison into a very different calculation if the subscription itself turns out to already be covered.
GraduatesFirst offers free practice tests with registration. TestSolve offers one free solve, then paid question packs.
Yes. Practise with GraduatesFirst to understand question formats, then use TestSolve during your actual assessment for AI-powered answers.
TestSolve supports 30+ test providers. GraduatesFirst focuses primarily on numerical, verbal, and inductive reasoning.
Possibly — GraduatesFirst is integrated into careers services at over 150 UK universities, so check with your careers service before paying for a personal subscription.
TestSolve's instant-answer approach generally suits a compressed timeline better, since GraduatesFirst's structured study library is built for use over several weeks rather than a few days.
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