CDCR Correctional Officer Sample Questions: What They Look Like
CDCR publishes a sample exam grouping its questions into twelve typed blocks, each with its own instruction. Reading those instructions before test day is the cheapest preparation available.
Read CDCR's own sample first
CDCR publishes a Sample Written Selection Exam for Correctional Officer, linked from its Written Examination page, and it is free. It contains twenty representative questions with an answer key and explanations. Whatever else you do, work through it — it is the only material that is authoritative, and nothing on this site is.
What it is not is a practice bank. Twenty questions is one sitting, and once you have seen them they are spent. That is the gap this product exists to fill.
The shapes the questions take
Several types put a document in front of you and ask a question answerable only from it: a schedule with times and durations, a completed form with columns, a short passage of procedure. Nothing in these needs knowledge you were expected to bring.
Several test written accuracy: which of four numbered words carries a grammar or spelling error, and which of four descriptions reports a form completely and clearly without adding anything.
Two are visual. One asks how many details differ between two otherwise identical pictures, or which of three pictures differs from an original in exactly so many ways. The other shows a scene and asks which description of it is most complete and accurate.
Two apply a stated rule to a case — one to a described situation, one to a completed form. And one shows two accounts of the same event and asks which of the differences between them would need to be looked into.
The twelfth type, and why we leave it alone
The last type gives you a dilemma and a list of possible responses, and asks for the LEAST appropriate action. RankHigh does not prepare it. There is no defensible key to a judgment item outside the department that wrote it, and coaching you toward a guess at what a scoring panel wanted would be worse than leaving it alone and saying so.
Read CDCR's sample for those two questions so the format is not new on the day, and spend your preparation time on the eleven types that can be practiced honestly.
Sources
- CDCR — Sample Written Selection Exam for Correctional Officer · checked 2026-08-23
- CDCR Peace Officer Careers — Written Examination · checked 2026-08-23