This year, I'm pinning all my hopes on Santa, and I want to believe he can deliver what I'm lacking - an ability to lay tiles. Higher education has come to this. Not erudition, analytic skills, or strength of character, just tile-laying.

As the pressure to find work in the Big Bad World mounts, the reality facing me and thousands of other Scottish undergraduates becomes starker as we prepare to meet the big employers.

We aren't even over Christmas or the new year, but applications for jobs that start in ten or eleven months time have deadlines that have already passed or are about to expire.

Every time I open a newspaper or read news online, there are two words that keep jumping out at me: youth and unemployment. Despite deadlines for essays and other pieces of coursework piling up beside me in the library, I am now studying for a degree in job hunting, or at least that is how it seems.

I certainly hope I will be asked the following question in a job interview: Can you give an example of when you have had to prioritise and use your multi-tasking skills?

Of course. I was filling out your overly long application form two days before the deadline while reading about the French Algerian War for my tutorial. But I was also editing my student newspaper because I know you like to choose students who can prove strong leadership skills. This was tricky as I was also doing a part-time internship to prove to you that I am committed to learning more about the industry you are in. It was easy though, because I just didn't sleep so I could write my essay on Sense and Sensibility. Simple.

Don't believe that with graduation far off in the summer haze of next year, students can simply concentrate on academic work. You have to be strategic and on the ball if you have the slightest hope of coming out of university with a degree and a job offer.

The big graduate employers (Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, Ernst and Young and PWC) court university careers centres. They leave behind little gifts for you and will provide wine at the end of the employer presentation evenings (this is very important).

Indeed, they buy you into believing that they do support fresh talent and they really think you could be one of their employees.

Maybe they do. But the application process is not founded on anything to do with the aim of sourcing the best people for the job. They make it impossible, even for those with the best C.V. in hand.

Have you heard of numerical and verbal reasoning tests? Or aptitude tests with psychometric testing? If you graduated five years ago whispers of them might have reached you. Ten years ago and these means of torture won't have affected you.

Faced with thousands of applications each year, those now rare organisations offering graduate placements have resorted to testing measures to instantly put more than half of potential new recruits in the bin.

While I understand there has to be a way of sorting out the good from the very good, the introduction of reasoning tests could leave out some very worthy candidates.

It doesn't matter who you are, what your results are, or what your C.V. looks like, employers won't even look at them if you can't pass ridiculous tests - some of which you cannot revise for.

Some employers will turn round to graduates and tell them that their personality test results show they would not be suited for the job. What do you want from me?! Did I show too much individuality? Should I tone down my enthusiasm? Am I boring?

Personality assessments don't do much for your self-esteem but are they an accurate measure of suitability for the job?

Take another example, the logical reasoning test that involves pictures on a screen and you have to select the missing tile to complete the pattern. You either see it or you don't, but thirty seconds to work it out is a bit tight. It is this test that I failed last week when applying for a very well known company.

Although I was none too fussed about this employer, I am increasingly disappointed that merit in job applications boils down to picking out the right picture. It sounds all too much like a nursery assessment to make sure you don't put the circle in the square slot.

Did the C.E.O's of these massive companies have to do such ridiculous tests? Probably not.

The assessment of numerical and verbal reasoning is even creeping into more traditional arts based employers so that even those who might be wholly suited to publishing but are weak in maths will not be admitted.

I'll tell you what isn't logical, it's these logical tests in the first place. But what do I know? I couldn't fill in a pattern in less than 30 seconds. I'm obviously doomed.