How to use a
NYC Correction Officer practice test

What this exam actually asks of you

The NYC Correction Officer exam is 110 questions across 11 sections in 141 minutes. Eleven abilities sounds like a wider exam than it is. Six of them are reading and reasoning about written orders, which is the bulk of a correction officer's paperwork.

The mistake that ruins the result

Spreading your time evenly across eleven sections. Six of them are reading and reasoning about written orders, which is one skill, not six.

How to sit it

All 11 sections in one sitting of 141 minutes, clocks enforced. Passing is not the goal: the exam produces a list number, hiring runs down that list, and a few marks decide where on it you land.

What to do the day after

Number Facility runs at about fifty seconds a question, the fastest section on any exam in this line. It is a speed problem, not a mathematics problem.

What a practice test owes you

A Correction Officer result is a list position, not a pass or a fail. The gap between a list number of 300 and one of 3,000 is usually the gap between being called and never being called, and a practice sitting is where you find the marks that move you.

Our NYC civil service bank holds 2,576 questions and 7,728 wrong answers, and every one of those wrong answers carries its own sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking. Not one is left bare, and a build of our site fails if that stops being true. For Correction Officer candidates that is the difference between knowing you missed 11 questions and knowing which ability each one was testing.

We also measure whether the paper can be beaten without being read. On our NYC civil service exams the best any length-based strategy scores is 40%, against the 25% that pure guessing gives. A practice test where picking the longest option beats guessing is measuring the person who wrote it, not your child. That figure covers all eleven civil service titles together, Correction Officer among them, because they draw on one shared bank of ability questions.

Eleven sections is the widest ability list here, so a practice sitting is mostly a map of where your time goes.

Where to sit one

We publish two full Correction Officer practice exams with no questions shared between them, and you can sit a single section on its own when that is all the evening allows. A free sample is on the samples page, and it needs no account.

More on this exam: the full Correction Officer guide.

Common questions

How long should a Correction Officer practice test take?

141 minutes for all 11 sections, 110 questions in total.

Should a Correction Officer practice test be timed?

Yes. The Correction Officer exam is timed section by section and a section does not reopen, so an untimed run tests something else.

Is the score the useful part of a Correction Officer practice test?

No, the reasons are. Every one of the 7,728 wrong answers in our NYC civil service bank carries a sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking, and for Correction Officer that is what turns a list of misses into a plan.

How often should we sit a Correction Officer practice test?

Twice is usually enough. There are two Correction Officer forms with no questions in common, so the second sitting is a genuinely new paper.