CritiCall Test Tips: The Four Rules and the Typing Bar

CritiCall is the 911 dispatcher test from Biddle Consulting Group, sat on its TestGenius platform. More than 1,400 public safety agencies in the United States and Canada use it, and there is no single version: each agency chooses its own modules from a catalogue of over twenty and sets its own pass mark for each one. That makes it hard to prepare for by reading about it, and easy to prepare for once you know which parts reward practice.

Learn the four decision rules before anything else

The Decision Making module, and the emergency messages that interrupt every multi-tasking module, all turn on four rules that Biddle publishes in its candidate guide and tells you to learn in advance. They are not shown during the test. In short:

• Police when someone is harming or threatening a person, or causing damage to someone’s property.
• Fire when there are flames or smoke, a fire alarm is sounding, or someone is trapped or confined and needs to be released.
• EMS when there is a medical emergency that needs medically trained people.
• Utility when public water, electric power (including power lines, streetlights and traffic signals), home heating gas or sewer drains have failed.

Each message gives you 15 seconds. After that the answer is worth nothing, however right it is. The guide also tells you to use only these rules and not how your own local agency would respond, which catches out candidates who already work in emergency services.

The typing modules are scored as a rate

Keyboarding is scored in words per minute and Data Entry in keystrokes per hour. Biddle does not publish exactly how either is counted, but the published cut scores make the target clear. Florida Highway Patrol’s dispatchers set keyboarding at 33.5 words per minute and data entry at 4,038 keystrokes per hour, and agencies are allowed to lower those by up to three steps to give candidates the benefit of the doubt. Austin-Travis County EMS has asked for 35 words per minute at 80% accuracy.

Three habits move a keystroke rate more than raw finger speed. Use Tab to move between form fields, never the mouse. Type numbers on the numeric keypad with Num Lock on, which Biddle’s own guide recommends. And check each field once as you finish it: Biddle does not say whether a mistyped field still counts, so assume it does not.

What a passing score looks like

There is no universal pass mark, and most agencies only tell you whether you are moving to the next stage. The one full set of cut scores ever published comes from Biddle’s 2012 study with Florida Highway Patrol, where the agency’s own dispatchers estimated what a minimally qualified new hire should score:

• Percentage modules: 66% to 80% before any adjustment, depending on the module
• Keyboarding: 27 to 33.5 words per minute
• Data entry: about 2,800 to 4,000 keystrokes per hour
• Memory Recall: 77%, one of the highest percentage bars

In that study Keyboarding, Data Entry, Map Reading and Spelling were among the modules that predicted how well dispatchers did the job, so an agency is unlikely to go easy on them.

Practise the audio modules with a headset

Several modules play audio over a headset: spoken phone numbers you type from memory a few moments later, and words read inside a sentence that you spell for that meaning (patients or patience, brakes or breaks). Biddle’s own suggestion for the numbers is a simple drill: have someone read you seven-digit numbers with about five seconds between each, and type each one from memory. Hear it in two chunks, three digits and four, and start typing as soon as you can.

Spelling is marked in American English. If you learned British spellings, check the American form of any word you would write differently.

Sit it on the right device, in one block

CritiCall runs only on a laptop or desktop; TestGenius says its modules do not work correctly on a phone or tablet. On Safari you need to allow autoplay for the test site, or the audio will not play. A full sitting takes one to three hours and Biddle asks you to finish it in one go, so book the time as you would an exam.

You can practise nine CritiCall modules here, from Decision Making and Keyboarding (both free) to Data Entry with emergency messages, Map Reading and Cross Referencing, each scored in its real unit against Florida Highway Patrol’s published cuts.