How to use a
NYC Police Officer practice test

What this exam actually asks of you

The NYC Police Officer exam is 110 questions across 10 sections in 149 minutes. Almost everything on this exam is something an officer does in the first twenty minutes of a tour: read the order, work out who it applies to, notice what is off, and write it down so it holds up.

The mistake that ruins the result

Revising the Penal Law. This exam tests abilities, not job knowledge, and there is no procedure you are expected to know in advance.

How to sit it

All 10 sections in one sitting of 149 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

Memorization is the only section with a study page you are given and then lose, so it is the only one with a technique you can actually rehearse. Time that page.

What a practice test owes you

A Police 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 Police 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, Police Officer among them, because they draw on one shared bank of ability questions.

Ten sections is more surface area than any other title in this line.

Where to sit one

We publish two full Police 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 Police Officer guide.

Common questions

How long should a Police Officer practice test take?

149 minutes for all 10 sections, 110 questions in total.

Should a Police Officer practice test be timed?

Yes. The Police 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 Police 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 Police Officer that is what turns a list of misses into a plan.

How often should we sit a Police Officer practice test?

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