How to use a
NYC Stock Worker practice test

What this exam actually asks of you

The NYC Stock Worker exam is 162 questions across 9 sections in 215 minutes. Four documents that disagree with each other, and the question is which one is right. That is a stock worker's morning.

The mistake that ruins the result

Sitting half of it. At 162 questions over 215 minutes this is the longest paper in the line by nearly an hour, and stamina is part of what is being measured.

How to sit it

All 9 sections in one sitting of 215 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

Four documents that disagree with each other, and the question is which one is right. Check your errors against the documents rather than against the answer key.

What a practice test owes you

A Stock Worker 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 Stock Worker candidates that is the difference between knowing you missed 16 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, Stock Worker among them, because they draw on one shared bank of ability questions.

162 questions is the largest sample of any title here, which makes a practice result on this exam more reliable than most.

Where to sit one

We publish two full Stock Worker 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 Stock Worker guide.

Common questions

How long should a Stock Worker practice test take?

215 minutes for all 9 sections, 162 questions in total.

Should a Stock Worker practice test be timed?

Yes. The Stock Worker 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 Stock Worker 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 Stock Worker that is what turns a list of misses into a plan.

How often should we sit a Stock Worker practice test?

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