The Reading and Writing Questions on the NYC Correction Officer Exam
Two of the eleven abilities are verbal, and they point in opposite directions: one is taking meaning off a page somebody else wrote, the other is choosing the sentence that puts a fact down clearly.
Reading and writing are scored separately
Written comprehension is understanding what a passage says. Written expression is choosing the clearest way to report something. The notice lists them as separate abilities, and a candidate can be strong at one and weak at the other — which preparation treating them as a single verbal topic never discovers.
Why a sensible answer is so often wrong on the reading items
Only the passage counts. An option can be entirely true about a facility, about policy, or about the world, and still be wrong, because nothing in front of you supports it. Candidates with real experience lose more of these than candidates without it — the experience supplies an answer the passage never did.
- An option that adds a fact from outside the passage, however reasonable it sounds.
- An option that reverses a relationship, or reports the usual case as the actual one.
- An option that borrows a real detail and attaches it to the wrong person or place.
- An option that strengthens a hedge: often becomes always, a preference becomes a requirement.
What the writing items are really testing
Not grammar for its own sake. You are choosing the sentence that reports a fact clearly and completely, and the wrong options usually fail by attaching a description to the wrong thing, or by using a construction that quietly drops who did something.
It is the ability closest to the job: notes become a report somebody else relies on, and the ways a sentence fails on the test are the ways it fails in a file.