The Memory Section of the NYC Correction Officer Exam
You study material, it is taken away, and the questions come afterwards. That single mechanic is what makes the section hard, and it is why practising against material that stays on screen trains the wrong thing.
What the notice says
The Notice of Examination defines memorization as remembering information such as words, numbers, pictures and procedures, and says certain questions may need to be answered on the basis of documents or other information supplied to candidates on the day of the test. Material that is studied and then answered from recall is RankHigh's preparation of that ability, not a format DCAS describes.
What the notice does not publish is how long you get. Any source quoting a specific study period for this examination is quoting something other than DCAS — including preparation that carries the figure across from the city police test, which is a different examination with its own published kit.
How to study something you are about to lose
The common mistake is reading the material as a story. You will not be asked what happened; you will be asked for names, numbers and pairings, and those are the first things to go.
- Count before you read. Knowing there are three people and two locations gives every later detail somewhere to attach.
- Never hold a number on its own. A time, a bag number or an apartment is retained by the person it belongs to and lost when it is stored loose.
- Spend the last of the time on the two or three facts you know are not fixed, and let the rest go.
- Expect every wrong option to be a genuine detail from the same page. Recognizing a number is not the same as remembering whose it was.
How RankHigh practices it
Memory items here work the way the notice describes: the material appears, the time runs, and then it is withdrawn and cannot be reopened. The study period is RankHigh's own, chosen for the size of the material on the page, and is not presented as the examination's.
All of the material is invented for this bank — rosters, property logs and movement schedules that describe no real facility.