The Item Format and Official Rules

What a hole punching item looks like

Every hole punching item has the same two halves. On the left is a strip of fold panels, read left to right, showing a square sheet of paper being folded and then punched. On the right are five answer grids labeled A through E, each one a candidate pattern of holes on that same sheet after you unfold it again.

The paper is folded as shown, then punched through all layers. Which pattern shows the holes on the fully unfolded sheet?

A

B

C

D

E

Nothing about that anatomy varies. The sheet is always a square, the panels always run left to right, and the answers are always grids — never words, never numbers. The only thing that changes from item to item is how many folds there are, where the punch lands, and which grid is right.

The three official rules

The instructions above the section settle three things that would otherwise be guesswork:

• The paper is never turned or twisted. The sheet keeps the orientation you are given. Nothing rotates, nothing flips over end for end, and no panel is a rotated view of the panel before it. Whatever moves in a panel moved because it was folded.
• The paper always stays within the edges of the original square. A fold can bring paper inward and lay it on top of paper already lying there, but no fold ever pushes any part of the sheet outside the boundary of the square it started as. That boundary is fixed for the whole item.
• After the final fold, holes are punched through every layer of paper at that spot. The punch is not a mark on the top sheet. It goes all the way down through the stack, so every layer sitting under the punch comes away with its own hole.

Read that third rule carefully, because it is the engine of the whole section: the punch happens once, after the last fold, and it pierces the entire stack beneath it. A punch on a two-layer stack produces two holes in the unfolded sheet. Working out how many layers sit under the punch, and where they land when the paper opens, is the work of the next two lessons.

The official wording allows one or more punches. The items you will drill always punch exactly one position, so every item you practice here is a single punch made after the final fold.

Reading an answer grid

Every answer choice is the same grid: 16 positions in four rows of four, one for each place on the original square where a hole could sit. The grid is the sheet fully unfolded, back to the square it started as.

Two glyphs carry all the meaning. A dark, filled circle is a hole. A light, open circle is a position with no hole. All 16 positions are drawn on every answer, so the five choices differ only in which circles are filled — never in size, spacing, or how many circles they show. That uniformity is deliberate: it forces every comparison between choices onto which positions are filled, and nothing else.

Five choices, exactly one correct

Each item offers five grids and exactly one of them is right. The other four are deliberate near misses rather than filler: each one is a pattern some plausible mistake on this very item would produce, so none of them looks absurd. Taking their anatomy apart is a later lesson.

A

B

C ✓

D

E

Because there is exactly one correct grid, a candidate that disagrees with the real answer in even one position is wrong outright. There is no partial credit and no "closest" answer.

Where hole punching sits on the PAT

Hole punching is the fourth of the Perceptual Ability Test's six sections: questions 46 through 60. It follows angle ranking and comes before cube counting. You can generate unlimited items of the kind above in the hole punching practice generator.

The takeaway

An item is a left-to-right strip of fold panels followed by five 4×4 answer grids, A through E, of which exactly one is correct. The paper never turns or twists and never leaves the edges of its original square. One punch, made after the final fold, goes through every layer beneath it — and the answer grid marks the result with dark circles for holes and light circles for everything else.