The APIL B test aims at assessing the person’s capacity to learn in the future. The most effective way to do this is to give the candidate new cognitively challenging material to learn in the testing situation and assess the degree of learning which takes place. The learning material should be unrelated to the content of any real-life discipline - to prevent any individuals having an unfair advantage.

The scores indicate the degree to which the person is likely to be able to learn and master cognitively demanding new challenges of an occupational or educational nature. Because the test material is deliberately unrelated to any particular discipline, the scores do not give a direct indication of which career direction would be most appropriate for the individual. A person with high learning potential as measured by the APIL would probably be able to master tertiary education in engineering, computer science, chemistry, accountancy, and many disciplines. The actual choice of career direction is a function of interests and career availability.

The APIL is intended for candidates with at least 12 years of education. The battery is often used to identify individuals likely to succeed at university or technikon, or in jobs with a high decision-making or technical content.

The full battery takes about 3 hr 45 min to administer, but parts of the battery may be omitted.

The APIL battery produces the following scores:

• Conceptual reasoning
• Speed of information processing;
• Accuracy of information processing;
• Cognitive flexibility;
• Learning rate (difference between last and first session in a repeated exposure exercise);
• Overall output in the above-mentioned learning exercise;
• Memory and Understanding of material to which the candidate was exposed;
• Transfer of knowledge and skill to new but analogous tasks in a graded learning exercise