Took the Morgan Stanley online assessment last week. Interviewing for a Senior Software Engineer role on their risk tech team. Here's what the format actually looked like so you can stop guessing.
Platform: HackerRank. Standard timer. Proctoring is not enabled on the one I got, but do not count on that.
Format: 2 coding problems, 90 minutes. That's it. No MCQ, no SQL, no "debug this code" section. Just two algo problems.
Difficulty: both were LeetCode medium difficulty. One graph problem, one DP. The graph one was a variant of "find all nodes reachable within k steps" with a twist I won't spoil because it might still be in rotation. The DP problem was similar to a knapsack variant but framed as portfolio allocation, which was a cute domain-specific wrapper.
Neither problem required you to know finance. The portfolio framing was decorative, the actual problem was just DP.
Time was enough if you're practiced. I finished in 55 minutes but I've been grinding for 3 months so take that with salt.
One thing I noticed: the test environment flagged an error when I pasted code from my IDE. Had to type it out. Minor annoyance but heads up.
After the OA I heard back in 8 days with a phone screen invite. So the turnaround on results is not instant, they're doing actual human review.
For people wondering what to study: data structures fundamentals (graphs, trees), DP is worth knowing 5-6 patterns deep, string manipulation. Don't overindex on system design for this stage. That comes later.