P&G Grid Challenge: What the Working Memory Task Measures & How to Practice

TL;DR: The grid challenge is a working memory task: patterns appear on a grid, disappear, and you reproduce them — getting harder until you break. It is one of the few genuinely trainable parts of an online assessment, because span responds to practice and, more importantly, to strategy. If it appears in your invitation, it deserves your preparation time ahead of almost anything else in the battery.

What candidates describe

Reports converge on the same shape: a grid appears with certain cells highlighted, the highlighting vanishes, and you mark the cells that were lit. Each correct round adds difficulty — more cells, a bigger grid, a shorter viewing window, or a delay before you answer. Some versions layer in interference: a second task between seeing and answering, so you have to hold the pattern while doing something else.

The task is associated with Aon's assessment suite (the family formerly known as cut-e), which appears in a range of large-employer online assessments including P&G's. Names, formats and combinations vary between employers and cycles — your invitation and its practice screens are authoritative, including over this page.

What it measures

Two things, and separating them is what makes practice effective.

Visuospatial working memory span — how much spatial information you can hold at once. This is the headline capacity, and it is what the difficulty ramp is triangulating.

Resistance to interference — whether your held pattern survives a delay or a competing task. Plenty of people have a decent raw span that collapses the moment something else demands attention, and versions with an intervening task are specifically probing that.

Employers read the combination as a proxy for holding several moving parts in mind while working — the sort of thing that shows up as keeping track of a process without needing everything written down.

Why it is worth practising (and the strategy that does the work)

Unlike behavioural or personality sections, this is a skill task, and skill tasks move. Some of the gain is genuine capacity growth; most of the early gain is strategy, which you can pick up in an afternoon:

• Chunk spatially, not cell by cell. Do not memorise five separate coordinates. See a shape — a diagonal, an L, a cluster in one quadrant plus one outlier. Three chunks are far easier to hold than five items.
• Encode once, cleanly. The commonest failure is a divided first pass: half-looking at the grid while already planning your clicks. Watch the pattern properly, then answer.
• Use the whole viewing window. People rush the encode and then sit staring at a blank grid. The reverse is what works.
• Anchor to landmarks. Corners, centre, edges. Relative positions survive better than absolute ones.
• Answer in a fixed order — say, top-left to bottom-right — every single time. Consistency reduces the chance of double-marking or skipping under time pressure.
• Commit partially rather than scrambling. If one cell is gone, mark the ones you have. A partially correct grid usually beats a reshuffled guess.

Practise the exact mechanic on the Corsi block visual memory test, which is the spatial-span task this most resembles. Then add the harder variants: digit span trains the verbal side, backward digit span forces you to hold and manipulate, and the n-back test trains holding a state while new information keeps arriving — the closest analogue to the interference versions. Every run is scored server-side against fixed norms and returns a percentile, so you can tell whether your span is actually improving.

Preparing for test day

• Baseline first. One cold run on Corsi blocks tells you where you start; everything after is measured against it.
• Short daily sessions beat long ones. Ten focused minutes a day. Working memory degrades fast with fatigue, and a tired session teaches bad pacing.
• Practise with the strategy, not without it. Chunking has to be automatic by test day, which means using it in every practice run rather than reverting to brute force.
• Fix the environment. Quiet room, no notifications, a proper mouse. This is the single most interruption-sensitive task in any online battery.
• Warm up immediately before the real thing. Two or three quick rounds so your first assessment grid is not also your cold start.

The rest of the assessment

The grid challenge rarely appears alone. For P&G specifically, the P&G PEAK assessment guide covers the full stage; for the vendor's other task types — including the switching and ability-scale tasks — see the cut-e / Aon assessment guide and the switch challenge guide. For how these fit modern screening generally, start from the complete guide to game-based assessments.

FAQ

What is the grid challenge test? A working-memory task where highlighted cells appear on a grid, disappear, and you reproduce the pattern — growing harder each round. It is part of the Aon/cut-e family of tasks and appears in several large-employer online assessments, including P&G's.

What does the grid challenge measure? Visuospatial working memory span, and in some versions your resistance to interference — whether the pattern survives a delay or a competing task in between.

Can you practise for the grid challenge? Yes, and it is one of the highest-return things to practise. Span improves with training, and chunking strategy improves it faster still.

What is a good grid challenge score? No employer publishes one. Results are compared against other applicants and to a bar the employer sets for the role, so aim to be comfortably above an unprepared field rather than at a specific number.

Is the grid challenge the same as the Corsi block test? Not identical, but very close in what it demands — both are visuospatial span tasks with an adaptive difficulty ramp, which is why Corsi practice transfers well.

Does it help to write things down? Assume not, and do not plan on it — online assessments commonly instruct against external aids, and your invitation sets the rules. The chunking strategy exists precisely so you do not need to.

GamePrep is an independent practice platform and is not affiliated with Procter & Gamble, Aon or cut-e. Task names and formats vary by employer and change between cycles — verify everything against your invitation. We provide related practice only — no leaked questions or answers.