Police Online Assessment Process: (Stage 3a) WRITTEN EXERCISE Questions, Tips & Answers!

Police Officer Written Exercise – How to PASS with TOP SCORES by Richard McMunn

Hello there, my name is Richard McMunn from the police officer recruitment training website, How2Become.com.

And in this tutorial, I’m going to teach you how to pass the new police officer online assessment centre. And in particular, we are going to focus today on the police officer written exercise.

If you are applying to become a police officer, you will have to undergo a written test. And during this blog and presentation, I will go teach you how to tackle it.

So, if you want to become a police officer, please make sure you stay tuned and watch this presentation fully from beginning to end, because I will help you to pass. Now, in particular, this is what I am going to cover.

• I’m going to give you an overview of the new police constable, online assessment process, and in particular, the written test or Stage 3a as it is otherwise known.
• I will give you a sample police officer written test question that we will work through together in a slow pace.
• I will show you my thought process and how I would tackle the question.
• I will give you some great tips on how to pass the police officer written test.

Let’s get started!

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Well, this exercise requires you to write a report or a response, assuming the role of a police constable, and you are completing this task for your senior officer.

We need to assume the role of a police constable and think like they would do and write a concise and accurate report or a response using information that is available to us.

This test is stated to take 40 minutes to complete the police officer written exercise, although you actually get 120 minutes to fully complete the test. You cannot pause the exercise to complete it later. You have to do it within one sitting.

You will be presented with four pieces of information. You must only use the facts and the information that is presented to you. You cannot add your own information or make inferences. That’s important. You will have to read through four pieces of information. And again, I’m going to walk through a sample exercise with you to show you how I would dissect the information and how I would use it in my report or my response.

You must only use the facts and the information that is provided. That’s the first very important tip!

What about the assessment criteria? Your written response will be scored against the following core values and competencies. You will be given a score of one to five with five being the highest. The best you can get in each competency or value.

The value is IMPARTIALITY. You have to remain impartial in how you write your report. And again, I will explain how to do that as we work through the exercise.

The core competencies that will be used during the assessment are WORKING COLLABORATIVELY. That’s working with other people. And again, I will show you how to do that successfully when creating a written report.

You also have to demonstrate being able to DELIVER. We have to deliver a good report. We also have to be SUPPORTIVE AND INSPIRE. The way that we write the report needs to be concise and professional as well, and representative of the police service.

And then finally, ANALYSE CRITICALLY. You will need to read all the information that is given to you, analyse it carefully, and then use the facts and the information to create your own report.

You can see there why the police have chosen that value and those core competencies.

TOP TIP: Although GRAMMAR, SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION are NOT assessed, it is important that we focus on accuracy when writing our written report. If it’s between you and a candidate that has scored the same but they have no errors in their report, it’s likely it will be the other candidate that gets hired. Let’s now start working through an example police officer written test exercise to help you. This is going to take a little bit of time. But I want to show you my thought process, how I would tackle a particular question. Let’s take a look at an example exercise.

Read all information provided and then respond to the complaint letter.

What we have here is an email from my sergeant, Sergeant Walker. Let’s start reading through this e-mail and this will tell me what I need to do.

So, we have received this email and we therefore have to create a response now.

We are provided with additional items of information. So that’s the first one that we are provided with. We know what we need to do now. This is the letter of complaint from Shirley Smith. Let’s start reading it…

So, you read the first attachment. We need to sort out the relevant information from the non-relevant. What do I mean by that? If we look at the letter from Shirley Smith, some of the information is useless to us in creating a police officer written report.

We need to look at it and think which aspects of our complaint do we need to respond to?

As you are reading through the letter or the documents make a point of picking out and remembering any information that is going to be pertinent to your police officer written response.

Remember that you are going to be responding to this, disputing Mrs Smith’s claims as per the request from your Police Sergeant. But you still have to present a polite and responsible outlook. That is very important.

With this in mind next, I’ve highlighted the parts of Shirley’s complaint that I think will be useful in helping us to create our response. And you can see below that I’ve highlighted the important aspects in bold.

The above information is going to help me to provide my police constable written exercise response based on the police core competencies and values. So, I can pick the aspects of the complaint that I need to focus on specifically.

Next, we are given another attachment and below is, this time, a set of statistics and data for North Ficshire High Street for this year. And the datasheet includes monthly statistics for crime.

So, we’ve got January and you can see that it says the total number of crimes committed is 76.

Then, we’ve got February – total number of crimes committed, 136.

March 206… They are increasing. And then April, 311.

Now, that’s a lot of crime for police officers to deal with!

Then the police have implemented Operation Beefeater from May onwards. They have come down significantly to 102, which means the operation Beefeater, with all the police officers on foot patrol and doing a stop and searches, has had a positive impact.

Clearly you can see from the information above that Operation Beefeater has had a significant impact. The total number of crimes committed has dropped hugely, and there has also been a huge decrease in the number of people charged with carrying unlawful weapons. This is all great information to include in your response to Shirley Smith at the end of the exercise.

When I create my report, I will refer to this within my response. You can see now how you are ANALYSING CRITICALLY information to help you present your police officer written report using facts and information provided.

We are then given Police Officer Written Exercise attachment number three.

This is a police officer written report from the stop and search of Ben Smith, who is the son of Shirley Smith. And this is from PC Bradley and it says…

Here you have a certified report from a police officer who dealt with Mrs. Smith’s son showing that the stop and search protocol was completely warranted and that Ben Smith’s behaviour was in contradiction with his mother’s assertion that this was unprovoked.

Do you remember, I pointed that out in the highlighted part of her complaint that she was saying that it was unprovoked? Well, it was. And you can use this in your final response.

All this information is being extremely helpful to us. We have another attachment! Below are now some views of other shop owners and members of the public about Operation Beefeater. We’ve got four items here…

We are then given Police Officer Written Exercise attachment number three.

So that’s all information we can use when writing our police officer written report for this exercise of the online police officer assessment center and process.

This is great evidence for you to use in your response to Shirley! And there is clear evidence here that the increased police foot patrols have not deterred shoppers from coming to the street, as Shirley claims. And the general public feels safer and more secure as a result. Likewise, there is clear evidence that a meeting was held between members of the town.

And if you remember, Shirley mentioned that there was no opportunity to give feedback. So now we need to write out a police officer written response to Shirley.

You can see that what we’re doing there is we ANALYSE CRITICALLY all of the information. Remember that Analyse Critically is one of the police officer competencies being assessed, and if we write a concise police officer written report or response, this will meet the core competency of SERVICE, DELIVER AND INSPIRE.

Make sure you read the letter carefully to address every single point raised.

POLICE OFFICER WRITTEN EXERCISE RESPONSE TO SHIRLEY SMITH

IMPORTANT TIP: To pass the new online police constable assessment process, you will be writing your letter directly to your line manager – your sergeant. Make sure that you read the questions given from your sergeant carefully in your assessment and that you address them all individually – this is very important! The assessor needs to clearly understand which question you are addressing in your written report so they can mark it correctly. In your actual assessment, the letter from your sergeant at the beginning will ask you multiple questions which you will need to address whilst demonstrating your understanding of the core competencies and values of a police constable.