How we write our questions
The most important thing we can tell you about our questions is what they are not: they are not real exam questions. Here is why that is a feature, and how we build quality without them.
We never collect or accept “questions from the exam”
Real exam questions are confidential. Sharing them or studying from them is illegal, and a candidate caught using leaked questions can be disqualified from the exam and removed from the eligible list. Any product that hints it has “the real questions” is putting your appointment at risk.
So we do not want them. We do not collect, buy, or accept recalled questions from test-takers, tutors, or anyone else. If someone tries to send us “questions from the exam,” we decline them. Everything you practice here is original material we wrote ourselves.
What we do instead
Written to the official format, not copied
Each item is generated against the format specifications in the official exam announcement for the five tested sections, then calibrated to the structure, difficulty, and explanation style of the official sample questions. We match the shape of the exam — we do not reproduce it.
Validated for exactly one correct answer
Before a question goes live it is checked so that exactly one option is defensibly correct and every distractor is defensibly wrong. For the applying-rules and reading sections that means each distractor violates a specific clause or misreads a specific line — the same trap the official samples use.
Every question carries a provenance log
Each item records how it was produced: which section spec and sample-question pattern it was calibrated against, its difficulty target, and its review history. If we ever cannot explain where a question came from, it does not ship.
Continuous review from real usage
Every card feeds item analytics — how often each option is chosen, timing, and accuracy — and every card has a “Report an issue” control. Statistically strange items (for example, a distractor almost no one avoids) and reported items are pulled back into review.
A note on our mock exams
No agency publishes how many questions any of these exams contains — not the Office of Court Administration, not DCAS. Rather than guess or imply otherwise, each exam’s full-length mock uses a documented structure of ours: a question count and a time budget we chose, filled from the ability areas that exam’s own notice names, in the order the notice lists them. It is format-accurate by structure and never presented as the official count.
Where a notice does publish a timing protocol we follow it rather than ours. NYS Court Officer-Trainee 45-857 publishes a 5-minute study and 10-minute delay for its memory section, and its mock runs on exactly that. The DCAS notices publish no protocol at all, so the exams that test recall use a documented default of ours — 3 minutes, no delay — which is labelled as ours wherever a candidate meets it.
| Exam | Ability areas | Our mock length | Time budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| Court Officer | Ability areas: 5 | Our mock length: 100 questions | Time budget: 3 hour 15 minute |
| Traffic Enforcement | Ability areas: 7 | Our mock length: 85 questions | Time budget: 3 hour |
| School Safety | Ability areas: 9 | Our mock length: 85 questions | Time budget: 3 hour |
| Police Officer | Ability areas: 9 | Our mock length: 85 questions | Time budget: 3 hour |
| Correction Officer | Ability areas: 11 | Our mock length: 95 questions | Time budget: 3 hour 15 minute |
| 911 Technician | Ability areas: 7 | Our mock length: 80 questions | Time budget: 3 hour |
| Special Officer | Ability areas: 6 | Our mock length: 70 questions | Time budget: 2 hour 30 minute |
| Environmental Police Officer | Ability areas: 9 | Our mock length: 85 questions | Time budget: 3 hour |
| Special Officer H+H | Ability areas: 6 | Our mock length: 70 questions | Time budget: 2 hour 30 minute |