An Athena assessment is either the Athena Quotient, a judgment test that Athena Assessment Inc. sells to employers at athenaq.com, or one stage of the hiring process at Athena, the executive assistant company at athena.com. The two are separate businesses, and only one of them is scored by the employer you applied to.
The AthenaQ test: rank phrases, no time limit
Athena Assessment Inc. runs athenaq.com from Boiling Springs, South Carolina, under the label cloud-based pre-employment testing. Its product is the Athena Quotient. The company says the AQ measures judgment, and that it is not an IQ test, a personality profile or a psychological test.
The task is a ranking exercise. You place a series of phrases in order from the one you consider best to the one you consider worst, and your scores come from the order you choose.
Timing is generous. The AQ page says there is no time limit and that how long you take does not change your score. AthenaQ also says there is no pass or fail, and calls the AQ an evaluation rather than a test.
What the employer receives
The AQ is sold per assessment or under a license agreement. AthenaQ says the test measures the influence of four categories of stress on judgment, and that reports can be built around an employer's own best and worst performer groups.
AthenaQ does not publish the number of phrases in the AQ, the scoring formula, or an official practice test.
Athena's own assessment for executive assistant applicants
Athena is a different company. It gives leaders a dedicated, full-time executive assistant, and its careers site lists four stages for an Executive Partner: application and assessment, training program, candidate prep, client match. The assessment comes before any interview.
Applicants describe the day. A 2026 account lists an orientation, a language assessment graded on spoken English with a B2 pass mark, then a final interview, sometimes the same day. The language stage asked candidates to repeat sentences and answer opinion questions.
Older threads name a separate step: the grit assessment. Applicants in a 2023 r/buhaydigital thread describe it as multiple choice and timed, taken in one sitting with almost no break between questions, and hard on verbal reasoning and logic. Athena does not publish what the grit assessment contains, how it is scored, or which current roles still use it.
If you have been sent a link
The domain on the invitation tells you which test you face. A link to athenaq.com is the judgment ranking, which has no time limit. A link from Athena's recruitment team means a hiring stage, where a language check, an AI task or a grit assessment follows depending on the role.
What employers can borrow
The AQ is a purchased instrument with a report attached, and it ranks candidates on one trait. Athena's process puts a language check, an AI task and interviews around its assessment, so no single score decides the hire. Either way, a scored stage belongs inside a wider AI Candidate Evaluation, with the rest of the process designed around what the score can and cannot tell you.
Tell candidates what each stage measures before they start it. Send a clear follow-up email to a candidate after a failed assessment instead of going quiet. And if you run take-homes next to a judgment test, apply the checks in how to tell if a candidate cheated on a coding assessment to those stages, not to the AQ.