The court officer exam memory section, and how to prepare for it

The sequence

The exam opens with it. You get five minutes with a written account of an incident. The account is then taken away. Ten minutes pass. Then the questions appear, and you answer from memory. All of that time counts inside the exam's 195 minutes.

What the real exam shows you during the ten-minute wait is not published. Plan for it to give you nothing to look at.

Why most practice gets it wrong

Practice material often prints the account above the questions. That tests reading, not memory, and it hides the real difficulty: the gap. Ten minutes is long enough for the order of events to blur. Our practice exams remove the account and hold the wait, with the timing kept on our server, so refreshing the page does not bring it back.

What the questions ask about

Expect the facts a court officer would have to write up afterward: who was involved and what their role was, where people and things were, what happened in what order, the times, and what was done in response.

A way to read the account

1. First pass, for the story. One quick read, just to know what happened.
2. Second pass, for the categories. Go back through for people, places, times, objects and actions, in that order. Say each one to yourself.
3. Last minute, the odd details. A color, a room number, the one person who arrived late. Questions like to ask about the detail that does not fit.

During the wait

Run the story through in order, once, then stop. Rehearsing it over and over for ten minutes tends to replace what you read with your own version of it.

Practice it more than once

Memory for this kind of account improves with repetition, and it improves fastest when every practice uses a new account. Each of our three forms has its own.