Preparing to take the corrections officer certification exam entails not only learning the content tested on the exam, but also learning test-taking strategies to help you do your best.
Make a plan about how you will study for the corrections officer certification exam several months before you actually take the exam. The more time you give yourself, the more you can amend your study plan as you go along and discover which concepts you are very familiar with and which concepts you need to spend more time on. Obtain all of the study materials you think you will need and make a schedule detailing when you will use each one. Your schedule does not have to be down to the hour or even down to the day, but rather you should roughly outline what you need to get done before the exam in order to ensure that you have enough time to adequately study the material. Plan to finish learning any new material about a week or so before the exam, then spend the week before the exam reviewing your notes and the concepts that were the most challenging for you. Take a break the night before the exam instead of trying to cram in any additional information.
Make sure that your body as well as your mind is prepared to take the corrections officer certification exam. Get plenty of rest the few days before the exam so that you are not distracted by feeling tired. Also be sure to eat a good breakfast or lunch before you take the exam. Eat something that contains plenty of protein so that you do not get hungry in the middle of the test. The corrections officer exam is four hours long, and you need to have eaten food that will sustain you.
Allow yourself extra time to arrive at the exam facility. If you have never been to the area where the facility is located before, be sure you look up directions ahead of time or bring a GPS device so that you do not have trouble finding the test center. Once you arrive at the test center, you should check in and familiarize yourself with the environment. Take note of where the bathrooms and drinking fountain are in case you need them during the exam. You will be in an exam room with many other people, so be mentally prepared to ignore distractions such as the sound of other peoples’ pencils or coughs.
Pace yourself once you begin the exam. Different people prefer to pace themselves in different ways. You may wish to look over the entire exam at its onset and make a plan for pacing, or you simply may wish to dive right in. Either way, you should spend an average of 72 seconds on each question.
When answering multiple choice questions, eliminate any answer choices that you know immediately are incorrect. Even if you do not know the correct answer, this will narrow down your chances of answering incorrectly. Be sure you answer every question on the exam; there is no penalty for guessing and getting a question wrong, but you have no chance of earning points on questions that are left blank. Sometimes, the answer to one question may be contained in another. Mark questions for further review if you are unsure of your answers. When you finish the exam, you can go back and see if you have any new insight on how to answer these questions. However, keep pacing in mind if you intend to leave a lot of time to check your answers. All of the questions are worth the same amount of credit, so you are better off leaving some difficult questions to the end of the exam rather than agonizing over them as they arise and potentially wasting time fretting over an answer you are not sure is correct.
Format of the Corrections Officer Exam
Gaining familiarity with the format of the corrections officer certification exam will help you be prepared to take the exam in several ways. First, knowing what kind of questions to expect on the exam will alleviate anxiety on test day because you will not be surprised by any questions on the exam. Being familiar with the exam format will also help you take the exam faster, so you can spend more time theorizing about the correct answers rather than figuring out how to answer the questions.
There will be two hundred questions on the corrections officer certification exam, and you will have four hours to answers them all. At that rate, you should answer fifty questions ever half of an hour, or, to be very precise, spend about one minute and twelve seconds on each question. Realistically, though, some questions will be much easier for you to answer than others. Do not spend excess time on questions that you know the answer to immediately; just put down the correct answer and move on. You will likely need the excess time that you saved to ponder over more difficult questions that require a higher level of thought.
All of the questions on the correction officer certification exam will be multiple choice. Most will have four answer choices, but some questions will be either true or false. The content of the questions is taken directly from materials meant to help you study and prepare for the exam; in other words, if you invest time learning the concepts in your study materials, you should be able to pass the exam. Exam-specific study materials are available through the American Correctional Association.
Although you only need one year of work experience to qualify to take the correctional officer certification exam, some people choose to take the exam after they have many years of experience as a corrections officer. However, do not confuse work experience with preparedness for the corrections officer certification exam. Even if you have worked in the field as a corrections officer for years, you will still benefit from reviewing study materials for the exam. While all of the content on the exam is relevant to working in the corrections field, some specific questions may not come up frequently in your particular line of work, in which case reviewing these concepts before the exam will help you earn the score you desire.
Some questions on the corrections officer certification exam will be designed to simply ask you to recall content you learned while studying or on the job. Other questions require higher levels of thinking in which you must apply the content you learned to a particular situation that could arise in the work environment. These situational questions are designed to test your ability to utilize intellectual knowledge in the real world.
Some other questions on the exam are worded in complex ways. These questions may actually be asking about a rather simple concept, and are testing your ability to pick out the concept that the question is based on. You will need knowledge of your field in order to answer these questions correctly, as well as the skill to decipher what the question is asking you.
Other questions may have more than one multiple choice answer that appears to be correct. While several choices may be factually accurate, there will always be one answer that is the best answer to each particular question. When you read each question, pay attention to specifically what it is asking, and choose the answer that best answers the question, even though other answers may correctly apply to other situations. Be ready to answer questions that are negative in nature as well; these will ask you to choose an answer that does not fall into a particular category. If necessary, rephrase these questions in your head in order to focus on what they are asking for.
Offender Contact Content on the Corrections Officer Exam
The content on the corrections officer certification exam was developed by a panel of people with years of experience working in the correctional security field. The two main components of the exam content are contact with offenders and the climate of the facility. The authors of the exam based content on what their experience informed them was appropriate knowledge to understand in order to succeed as a correctional officer.
The content in the offender contact portion of the exam is divided into three subcategories. The first subcategory is generally managing offenders. About 10% of the exam covers managing offenders. Managing offenders includes both maintaining physical control over offenders when necessary as well as managing conflicts between offenders. You will need to know when it is and is not appropriate to use force in order to subdue offenders. You will also need to know how to recognize an offender’s crisis or a conflict between offenders and the proper procedure for intervening in order to ensure everyone’s safety.
It will be your job to establish a rapport with offenders. You will also be responsible for searching cells when necessary and conducing appropriate inspections. Part of your job is also to help offenders acclimate themselves to the facility and be as comfortable as reasonably possible. This includes orienting new offenders to the facility. During the course of your interactions with offenders, you should be prepared to provide counseling, either written or verbal, to those who need it. The correction procedure for filling out disciplinary or incident reports is also included under the managing offenders section of the offender contact portion of the corrections officer certification exam. You will need to know the appropriate information to include in these reports and how to document them accurately.
The next subsection of the corrections officer certification exam covers controlling offender movement. About 23% of the exam is composed of this topic. Controlling offender movement includes being aware of how offenders are moving throughout the facility as well as orchestrating scheduled movements, such as moving from one cell to another or attending appointments. If an offender requests to be moved to a different cell, you may be responsible for handling this request and providing recommendations about where would be best for the offender to stay. When offenders need to attend prescheduled appointments, you will be responsible for issuing and collecting their appointment slips. You will also need to supervise their movement throughout the facility and oversee any movement of an offender’s property.
Offenders will need to be escorted, and you will need to do so either on an individual or a group basis. On other occasions, you must keep offenders in one place in order to perform physical counts.
The last subsection of the offender contact portion of the corrections officer certification exam is maintaining the health and safety of offenders and communication with offenders properly. This makes up 5% of the exam. This subsection includes overseeing the distribution and use of hygiene products by offenders. You will be tested on how to properly take inventory, distribute hygiene items, and order additional supplies when needed. You may need to develop the offenders’ cleaning schedule as well as document which hygiene items are provided to which offenders. These items will all need to be labeled properly, especially those that are considered hazardous. You will also need to keep accurate records of health and safety memos and document any health and safety recommendations that you have to improve the hygiene processes at your facility.
You will need to know how to properly interact with offenders who have infectious diseases in order to protect yourself, your colleagues, the infected person, and other offenders. You will need to supervise offenders when they perform hygiene practices and also supervise the cleaning of the facility. As you supervise them, you need to report any security violations or changes in an offender’s behavior.
Facility Climate Content on the Corrections Officer Exam
Slightly over half of the corrections officer certification exam contains questions that test you on ensuring the proper climate at your facility. These questions were written by experts who have worked in the correctional security field for years, and are designed to present real world situations that you may encounter on the job. The facility climate category of the corrections officer certification exam is divided into three subsections: general skills and equipment control, ethics and laws, and general knowledge covering the mission of a corrections officer and appropriate ways to interact with offenders. Some topics may appear in more than one subsection of the exam.
The general skills and equipment control subsection of the exam makes up about 18% of the exam. Although the corrections officer certification exam also has a section devoted to managing offenders, some questions of offender management may appear under general skills and equipment control. You will also be tested on how to appropriately communicate nonverbally with offenders, which can include both establishing your presence and communicating information. You will also need to know how to properly communicate with other personnel at the facility and how to document written communication.
Controlling equipment includes inspecting tools, keys, and shadow-boards. It also includes taking an inventory of all equipment at the beginning and end of your shift to make sure that everything is accounted for. You will need to know how to log equipment properly when you use it in work areas, as well as how to always maintain physical control of equipment so that it does not fall into the wrong hands. If any equipment goes missing, you will need to know how to report this properly.
You may be tested on proper first aid and CPR procedures, general leadership qualities and how you should best exhibit them in front of offenders, and how to conduct searches.
The next subsection of the corrections officer certification exam is ethics and law. This makes up about 19% of the exam. You will need to know some history of corrections and the court system, including the Prison Litigation Reform Act. You will be tested on your knowledge of how law suits work, indemnification, theories of liability, and trials and appeals. You will need to answer questions that describe both ethical and unethical behavior and how to investigate unethical behavior properly. You may be presented with some unclear situations in which you need to describe what the most ethical procedure would be.
The ethics and law section of the exam includes some procedures you must go through and how to execute them ethically, such as surveillance and monitoring, interviewing, taking evidence, and taking a polygraph test. You will also be tested on terms such as “reasonable suspicion,” ” hands on,” and “hands off.”
The general knowledge section of the exam covers some miscellaneous items that include the mission of a corrections officer and various administrative procedures. This part of the exam makes up about 26% of the exam. You will be tested on the purpose of a corrections officer’s role in the correctional system. You will also need to know what standards of professionalism are applied to corrections officers and how to embody these standards properly during your time on the job. You will need to understand differences in ethics, both in theory and in practice. A general knowledge of state and federal laws as they pertain to your employment, such as sexual harassment policies, will be tested as well. You will need to know what training is available to you should you seek it, as well as techniques for managing stress on the job. Other topics included in this section that may also appear elsewhere on the exam are the proper use of weapons, the proper use of force, and the proper use of other equipment and tools.