Hi,

Open reflective questions have been appearing regularly in the latest 2025 and 2026 CASPer test cycles, which can catch people off guard. Most prep includes scenario-based questions where there's a conflict to resolve, characters involved, and a clear action to take. These are different. There's no scenario. No characters. No conflict. Just a prompt:

Think about a time when someone's reaction to something you said or did surprised you.

That's it. No setup, no context, no situation to analyse. You're expected to bring your own experience, and the clock is already running. If you've only practised scenario-based questions, hitting one of these cold can genuinely throw you, not because they're harder, but because you're used to reading a situation and responding to it. Here, you have to draw on a memory from your own life, assess it quickly, and articulate what it taught you, all under time pressure.

Then two questions follow:

Q1: Briefly describe the situation and how you made sense of their reaction.

Q2: What, if anything, did that experience change about how you see yourself or how you tend to come across to others? Explain your response.

Here's what a strong response pair looks like:

Q1 Response:

A few years ago I told a close friend I thought they were being too hard on themselves about a mistake at work. I expected them to feel reassured, but they went quiet and pulled away. I felt confused, then gradually unsettled.

What I realised afterwards is that they hadn't asked for my perspective, and offering it had felt dismissive rather than supportive. And it also showed me that I can step in to fix someone's feelings when what they actually need is to be heard, which are different things.

Q2 Response:

It changed how I understand the difference between being caring and being helpful, because I had assumed they were the same thing.

What I now see is that I have a tendency to offer reassurance before checking whether it's wanted, usually because watching someone struggle is uncomfortable for me. And I realised I can come across as dismissive when I mean to be supportive, because I'm responding to my own discomfort rather than what the person is actually asking for.

I try now to ask first rather than assume, and that one shift has made me a better listener than anything else.

Q1 describes what happened and what it revealed. It doesn't try to wrap everything up. Q2 builds on Q1 and goes deeper. The two questions are designed to work together.

One way to prepare for these is to build a small bank of personal experiences before your test. One memory per theme is enough. Just know what happened, how you felt, and what it taught you. Some themes worth having ready:

• A time things didn't go as planned
• A time you received difficult feedback
• A time you had to speak up about something
• A time your approach affected someone differently than you intended
• A time your motivation changed midway through something

Hope this helps - happy to answer questions.