Unit 5: Written Examination Preparation
Preparing for the Written Examination
Evaluating Answer Choices
It is most likely that your law enforcement officer exam will consist of multiple choice questions. For each question there will be four or five answer choices. Some of the answer choices may contain half-truths. There could be more than one answer choice which would be a good answer. You task will be to select the one answer choice which is most correct. Some recent exams give partial credit for answers which are partly right, but your goal is to get full credit by selecting the answers which are fully correct.
MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
A multiple choice question consists of a “stem” or “fact pattern” followed by four or five specific answer choices. The stem or fact pattern contains information which is the basis of the question. The information may consist of a story about an incident, a definition of a crime, some crime statistics, a procedure to follow in certain circumstances, or even a picture of a person or street scene. Any kind of information can form the stem or fact pattern ofa question. If you are taking an exam based on an information package which has been given to you in advance, everything in the information package should be considered part of the fact pattern for all of the questions on the exam. Most law enforcement officer exams follow the fact patterns with four answer choices, which are labeled A, B, C and D.
Answer on the basis of the information given in the question. When answering test questions, you must base your answer solely on the information contained in the test question. The test for a law enforcement officer usually requires no previous knowledge of the job. The test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the law enforcement agency.
Although the test requires no previous knowledge, some knowledge of law enforcement agency procedures, equipment, tactics, etc. is likely to help a person do well on the test, because most questions are based on actual policies or practices. This course will give you familiarity with some common equipment and procedures. If you encounter some new procedure or technical term on the test itself, it will be explained on the test itself The problem arises when a person who is familiar with procedures encounters a test question based on something which contradicts actual practices. In this kind of situation you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says. For example, you might know that law enforcement officers do not take fingerprints but call a crime lab technician to do that; however, a test question might describe a law enforcement officer taking fingerprints at a crime scene. In this kind of test situation, never mind the actual practice; go by the information in the question.
Tell yourself the answer to a question before you look at the answer choices. Sometimes the question is too vague for you to anticipate the answer ahead of time. But often the question stem is precise enough for you to answer the question before you look at the answer choices. For instance, suppose you had a crime table, a list of crimes and how often each crime was committed in the past year, and then the question asked, “The kind of crime which was committed most often was:” You should be able to look at the crime table and answer this kind of question in your head before you look at the answer choices. If you answer the question in your head before you look at any of the answer choices, you are more likely to get the right answer.
Remember that part of the test maker’s job is to provide three false answers for every correct one. It is a multiple choice test, not a true/false test. A skillful test maker will offer you some false choices which seem pretty good in order to distract you from the correct answer. Among test makers these false choices are called “distractors.” But if you have already decided what answer you should be looking for, you will not be distracted so easily by bad answers which might look pretty good and which might come before the correct answer. A seductive (A) and a half-true (B) will not prevent you from reaching a correct (C) if you know what you are looking for.
Sort answers immediately into three categories. As soon as you read a particular answer choice, decide if it is Right, Wrong, or Uncertain. If you are quite sure that an answer choice is right, use your pencil to write an “R” in front of that answer choice immediately. But continue to read the other answer choices because you might find another right one and then have to make a final choice.
If you are quite sure that an answer choice is wrong, use your pencil to write a “W” in front of that answer choice immediately. You may find that an answer is wrong even before you have finished reading the whole answer. Stop reading it as soon as you are sure it is wrong and mark with an “W.” An answer which is partly wrong will not be the correct answer.
If you are Uncertain about whether a particular answer choice is correct, use your pencil to put a question mark (?) in front of that answer choice.
When you have finished reading all four answer choices, each one should be preceded by a “R” or an “W” or a question mark (?). If there is only one with an “R”, that is probably your answer. If you have more than one with an “R”, or a “R” and a question mark, you may need to think a bit before choosing your final answer. But you should not have to bother any more with answers you have given a “W” already.
Here is an example of a question with the answer choices marked as Right, Wrong, or Questionable:
There are certain offenses for which a police officer may issue a summons rather than make an arrest. One of these offenses is littering. If a police officer issues a summons for this kind of offense, the officer must get proper identificationfrom the person, or else the officer must bring the person to the police station until the person’s identity has been established. As a police officer, you have just stopped someone who was throwing hundreds of advertising circulars all around an intersection, so that the streets and sidewalks are littered with them. You have determined that you should issue a summons to this person. But the person is not carrying any kind of identification card or papers. He says he is the owner of the store on the corner. You should:
W (A) accept the words of another person at the scene who verifies this man’s name and verifies that he is the owner of the store on the corner.
W (B) accept the individual’s own word as to his name and address since his store is on the corner.
R (C) go to the store and be shown proper identification there.
? (D) take this person to the police station until his identification is verified.
Using this system, C is the best choice. A and B, accepting the individual’s word or the word of another unknown person are not reliable and therefore receive W’s. D is specified policy in the facts given and, therefore, is not wrong but rates a ? because it would be time consuming and tie up personnel. C is reliable and efficient.
Negative Questions: Using “R” and “W” to evaluate answer choices is better than using something like a check mark to denote a correct answer when it comes to answering negative questions. Negative questions are questions which ask you to pick out an answer choice which is “not true.” If you are evaluating each answer choice one by one and marking each one “R” or “W”, negative questions will be easy for you to handle.
Half-true Answers: Sometimes an answer choice really contains two different statements. For instance, an answer choice might say, “there is a bedroom on the right and the kitchen is on the left.” Maybe it is Right that “there is a bedroom on the right,” but Wrong that “the kitchen is on the left.” With this kind of answer choice, put a slash mark between the two different statements, and write “R” or “W” over each separate part of the answer choice. But out in the margin write “W” since an answer choice must be completely Right to be valid.
When it is difficult to choose between two answer choices, look back at the question stem.
Sometimes there are two answer choices which both look good. Or maybe all of the answer choices look bad. When you find yourself having trouble making the final choice of an answer, stop staring at the answer choices. Go back and look at the question stem and the information the question in based on.
A skillful test maker tries to make two or three of the answer choices look very good. All the answer choices may contain some truth, which makes them tempting. Or all may look wrong. But the test maker has to have put some detail into the fact pattern of the question to justify the claim that one of these answers is better than the others. If reviewing the answer choices themselves has not helped, the clue to which answer is correct is likely to be in the question stem or fact pattern rather than in the answer choices. So go back to the question stem and the fact pattern to look for the deciding factor.
Choose the best answer there. A very common problem for test takers is the problem of recognizing that the best possible answer to a question has not been included among the answer choices. None of the answer choices seems to be fully adequate to the situation. In part, this is often a result of the way multiple choice questions are constructed. The exam maker does not have to include all the correct procedures in answer choices; that might make for terribly long answer choices. Hence, some correct answers are only partial answers. Sometimes you will be given more than one partial answer and asked to choose which is the best among these. In this sort of situation, work at eliminating the answer choices which are definitely wrong or most seriously incomplete. For your answer choose the best one remaining after this kind of elimination process.