A 4-week study plan for the EU knowledge test

Last checked against sources: 26 October 2026. The plan is ours. The study methods behind it come from published research, cited below. No AD5 or AST3 test date is public: HR has committed to give at least two weeks' notice of each test (reported by a Commission staff union), so start now rather than wait for the invitation.

What the evidence says about studying for a fact test

• Test yourself; don't re-read. A major review of ten study techniques gave practice testing and distributed practice the highest overall utility rating, and rated rereading, highlighting and summarising low (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013, as reported by the Association for Psychological Science).
• Testing beats restudying after a delay. In one experiment, a week after studying a prose passage, students who had been tested on it recalled 56% of it, against 42% for students who had studied it again (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006).
• Space your reviews, and fit the gap to the deadline. In a study of more than 1,350 people, the best gap between first study and review grew as the final test moved further away, but shrank as a share of that time: from about 20 to 40% of a one-week delay to about 5 to 10% of a one-year delay (Cepeda and colleagues, 2008).
• Repeating the same test inflates the score. Retest gains on repeated ability tests are well documented in selection research (Hausknecht and colleagues' meta-analysis of practice effects). A mock you have already seen measures memory of that mock, not readiness.

For a test about four weeks away, we turn this into three habits: a short daily test, a re-ask of every miss one to three days later and again about a week later, and new rather than repeated mocks to measure progress.

Day 1: a diagnostic mock

Before reading anything, sit one full 30-question test under your real conditions: forward-only, an answer required to move on, 30 minutes at AD grades or 40 at AST. The free test does exactly this. Note your score in each of the three areas (institutions; Commission governance, budget and HR; the 2024-2029 priorities) and every question you guessed. Your weakest area gets extra drill time in week 3.

Weeks 1 to 3: read in ranked order, drill every day

Follow the tiers in what to read, ranked by exam value per hour: about 15.5 hours of official reading in all (our estimate), so about 45 minutes a day for three weeks. Add 10 to 15 minutes of drill every day, mixing the three areas rather than doing one area a day.

• Read with a pen. After each article or section, close it and write its numbers, actors and dates. Then check. That is practice testing applied to reading.
• Keep a misses list. Every wrong or guessed answer goes on it with its source sentence. This list is your week 4 material.
• Mind your cut-off. Only documents published before your competition's application period opened can be tested. See the content cut-off explained.
• Use the hubs for structure. The seven institutions compared, qualified majority voting and the 2024-2029 priorities each set one area out on a page.

Week 4: exam conditions

• Two or three full mocks in exam mode, each one new to you, with the AD or AST timer, forward-only, no notes. Space them a day or two apart.
• Re-drill every missed question from all four weeks, then re-read only the source sentence behind each miss.
• Practise the pace: about 60 seconds a question at AD grades and 80 at AST, deciding by about 45 or 60 seconds. See tactics for a test with no back button.
• No new documents in the last three days. Consolidate what you have.
• The night before: only the anchor facts, below. Then sleep.

Anchor facts for the last evening

The variant for EPSO AD5 Part 2

EPSO's open competition EPSO/AD/427/26 has its own knowledge test: the notice states 30 questions in 40 minutes, pass mark 15/30, and the score counts for 30% of the preliminary ranking and 25% of the final one. EPSO's FAQ says it will publish references to the source materials about two months before the testing session. Once that list is out, swap the reading tiers for EPSO's list and keep everything else: diagnostic mock, daily drill, spaced re-asks, unseen mocks in the last week. Practise with flag and return, since EPSO's platform allows moving between questions within a test part. See EPSO AD5 Part 2: the EU knowledge test.

Tools for the plan

You can follow this plan with the official texts and a notebook. If you want the questions ready-made: the free 30-question test covers day 1, and the daily quiz gives five questions a day with sources. Full access adds full mocks under Commission or open-competition rules, AD or AST timing, practice in English, French or German, drills by area and a NOT drill; details are on the pricing page.