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New York Local Police Captain exam format

Your Captain examination is one multiple-choice test out of the Department of Civil Service's Second- and Third-Line Police Supervisors Series. Here is what its test guide publishes about the paper, and the three things it pointedly does not.

Series
Second- and Third-Line Police Supervisors
Written by
NYS Department of Civil Service, which also rates it
Format
Multiple choice
Overall time allowance
6 hours for the series
Subject areas
Five, common to every test in the series
Number of questions
Not published
Weighting between areas
Not published

Five subject areas, and the guide says they are on every test in the series

One sentence carries the whole structure: the guide states that the series multiple-choice test has an overall time allowance of 6 hours, and that the tests in the series all include the subject areas it then lists. Five headings follow it.

That wording is worth noticing, because "all include" is a promise about the series rather than about your particular sitting. It is what lets a Captain and a Lieutenant prepare against one description — and it is not a promise that nothing else appears on your paper.

  • Area 1 — Knowledge of law enforcement methods, practices and procedures
  • Area 2 — Knowledge of New York State laws, sampled from four bodies of law the State publishes free
  • Area 3 — Preparing written material in a police setting, which this guide describes as more than one task
  • Area 4 — Understanding and interpreting written material, answerable from the selection alone
  • Area 5 — Planning, supervising, and administering police programs and activities, the area with no first-line counterpart

Three numbers the Department withholds, and what follows from that

Searched across the whole extracted guide, the phrase "number of questions" returns nothing and the word "weight" returns nothing. The Department publishes the six-hour allowance for the series and never divides it between the five areas.

So there is no honest way to say what proportion of your paper any one area is, and nobody outside the Department is in a position to tell you. An item count quoted for this title is an estimate somebody made. What can be stated truthfully is a count of areas, which is why nothing on this site puts a percentage next to this examination.

Areas 6 and 7 are in the guide and are not yours

The guide describes two further areas — evaluating information and evidence, and investigative techniques and criminalistics — and introduces them with the sentence that investigative titles in this series will include those additional subject areas.

A Captain title is not an investigative title, so those two are not a gap in your preparation and should never be counted against it. They belong to the Detective and Criminal Investigator side of the same series.

Your announcement outranks the guide

The guide sets its own limits in plain words: not all subject areas that might appear in this series are mentioned in it, specialized material is sometimes included in some examinations and is not described there, and the Examination Announcement lists the subject areas that will be included on the particular test you will be taking.

Read yours first, then read anything else — including this. Where your announcement and a test guide disagree about scope, the announcement is the document that governs your sitting.

Sources

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