How to use a
NYC Special Officer practice test

What this exam actually asks of you

The NYC Special Officer exam is 100 questions across 5 sections in 127 minutes. No maps, no memory page, no arithmetic. If you have prepared for the Police Officer exam and are sitting this one, half of what you practiced does not appear.

The mistake that ruins the result

Practicing the Police Officer paper. Special Officer has five sections, no memory page, no map and no arithmetic, so half of that preparation does not appear.

How to sit it

All 5 sections in one sitting of 127 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

Each of the five sections carries twenty questions, so no single ability outweighs another and your weakest section is simply your weakest section.

What a practice test owes you

A Special 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 Special Officer candidates that is the difference between knowing you missed 10 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, Special Officer among them, because they draw on one shared bank of ability questions.

Five sections of twenty is a hundred questions, and on a paper that short a handful of careless marks moves the percentile a long way.

Where to sit one

We publish two full Special 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 Special Officer guide.

Common questions

How long should a Special Officer practice test take?

127 minutes for all 5 sections, 100 questions in total.

Should a Special Officer practice test be timed?

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

How often should we sit a Special Officer practice test?

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