ACER Entrance Exam Tips: Victoria Police, QPSea and the FRV Written Selection Test
The ACER police and fire entrance exams are separately timed components with separate pass marks, no penalty for guessing, and an abstract reasoning section that runs at two completely different speeds depending on who invited you.
Three Australian emergency services run their entrance examinations through the Australian Council for Educational Research. The exams share a design, and most of what candidates get wrong about them comes from treating them as one long paper rather than as a set of short ones with separate clocks and separate pass marks.
It is not one test, it is three or four tests in a row
Fire Rescue Victoria puts it plainly: the Written Selection Test is 2 hours 5 minutes and "each of the four components is scored and timed separately". Queensland Police says the same about its three components across 1 hour 45 minutes. Victoria Police runs four components in two hours, having cut the exam down from four and a half hours when it moved to at-home online testing in November 2025.
That has a practical consequence people miss. A component you are strong at cannot rescue a component you are weak at, because they are not added together. Victoria Police publishes a pass mark for each: 105 or greater on literacy, on numeracy and on abstract reasoning, and 107 on report writing. You must clear every one.
It also means a failure is cheaper than it looks. Victoria Police charges $135 to re-sit one component, $191 for two and $284 for three or more, and says "all pass marks remain valid", so a pass you already have does not expire when you re-sit something else.
The abstract reasoning section runs at two completely different speeds
This is the single most useful fact in this article. Victoria Police runs abstract reasoning at 45 questions in 20 minutes. Fire Rescue Victoria and Queensland Police run it at 30 questions in 35 minutes. ACER describes the construct in identical words on all three sites, but that is 27 seconds a question against 70: the same test at 2.6 times the pace.
If you prepare at the slower pace and sit the Victoria Police exam, you will run out of paper. If you prepare at the faster pace and sit the FRV or QPS exam, you will rush items you had time to solve. Our ACER abstract reasoning practice test asks you which exam you are sitting before it starts, for exactly this reason.
Three item styles, and one of them nobody has seen before
ACER names its abstract reasoning styles itself, and there are exactly three:
- Next in sequence. Choose the shape that comes next. Familiar from every other aptitude test.
- Complete the pattern. Find the shape missing from a grid. Also familiar.
- Middle of sequence. Shapes are shown out of order. Work out the order, then choose the one that belongs in the middle.
The third is unusual and it is where practised candidates lose marks, because it is two tasks rather than one. You infer the ordering rule, and then you report the median element rather than an endpoint. The commonest mistake is solving the ordering correctly and then answering with the shape at one end, which is the answer to a question nobody asked. Slow down for the second step.
Guessing is correct, and ACER says so
Two things follow. A blank is the only answer that cannot score, so every question should carry a mark by the time the clock runs. And because you can move backwards within a component, triage is a real skill here in a way it is not on a forward-only test like the CCAT: put something down, flag it mentally, and come back.
The numeracy section gives you a calculator and forgives your rounding
Numeracy is the only ACER component with an onscreen calculator, provided in the app rather than allowed from your desk. Candidates who work in their heads on the measurement and area questions lose marks they did not need to.
ACER's own published answer key is also more generous than most. It accepts "$9013.66 or correct rounding to nearest 10 cents ($9013.70) or dollar ($9014)", and elsewhere "675 kJ (Between 670kJ and 680kJ accepted)" and "In the range from 212,000 to 217,000". So a sensible rounding is not a trap. Dropping a unit is.
The section also mixes three answer formats: multiple choice, typed numbers that carry a unit, and single questions with several true or false statements where every statement has to be right. Meeting the third format for the first time under a clock is avoidable.
The literacy section is not all prose
ACER says you will read "approximately 6 different types of texts" and that some "may include graphs, charts, diagrams, and maps that you will need to read and interpret". Most candidates practise passages and nothing else, then meet a timetable, a service record or a site plan on the day. Practise the non-prose texts specifically.
Response format varies inside the section too: "Most questions are multiple-choice, but some require you to answer 'true' or 'false', or 'yes' or 'no'". A two-way question is a coin toss if you skim the statement, so read what it actually claims, particularly where it contains "all", "only" or "every".
The report is a real component and it has the highest bar
Victoria Police and Queensland Police both include a typed report: 35 minutes, 300 to 350 words, with spell check, grammar check, dictionary, cut and paste and all formatting disabled. A word count is shown on screen. Victoria Police's pass mark for it is 107, higher than the 105 on the other three components.
It is rated on selecting relevant information, writing clearly, objectively and in a logical order, forming paragraphs, building complex sentences, and spelling and grammar. We do not simulate this, because a 300-word report cannot be scored the way our practice tests are scored and a word-count proxy would give you a number that means nothing. Practise it by writing 300 words in 35 minutes from a set of source documents, with the spell checker off.
It runs in an app under live supervision
The exam is not a browser test. You download the ACER Test App onto the computer you will use, at least three days before your session, and you cannot log in until the scheduled time. Remote sittings are proctored through ProctorU with a Guardian Browser, a webcam and a microphone. Work and school computers, tablets, phones, Chromebooks, Linux, virtual machines and Microsoft Edge are all unsupported, and the minimum screen is 13 inches at 1366x768.
Check your machine early. A candidate discovering on the morning that their laptop is managed by their employer and will not install the app has lost the sitting, not the question.
What the result looks like
You will not be given a percentile. The literacy and numeracy components are reported as a scale score aligned to the Australian Core Skills Framework, running from roughly 40 to roughly 170, and the outcome you see is "Standard met" or "Standard not met" per component. ACER does not publish how raw marks convert to that scale, so nobody outside ACER can tell you what a given number of correct answers is worth, and you should be wary of anyone who claims to.
ACER also runs multiple parallel forms of each test and equates them afterwards, so the exam is not adapting to you as you answer: "the analysis of WST results accounts for differences in test difficulty and places all test versions on a single scale". There are no appeals, and results stand for three years at Queensland Police and Fire Rescue Victoria.
If you want to practise the components, our ACER practice tests cover literacy, abstract reasoning, numeracy, mechanical reasoning and ACER Select Verbal at the real item counts and clocks.