ACER Practice Tests: Victoria Police, QPSea and FRV Selection

It is not one battery, it is a component set. The same handful of tests is recombined per employer, and each component is timed separately, scored separately and passed separately. If you fail one you re-sit only that one: Victoria Police charges $135 for one component, $191 for two and $284 for three or more, and says all pass marks you already hold remain valid. That is why we build these as five separate tests rather than one long paper.

Abstract reasoning runs at two completely different speeds, and this is the single most important pacing fact here. Victoria Police runs 45 questions in 20 minutes. Fire Rescue Victoria and Queensland Police run 30 in 35. ACER describes the construct in identical wording in both cases, but 27 seconds a question against 70 is a different test to sit. Our abstract reasoning practice asks you which exam you are sitting before it starts.

Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, and you can go backwards. ACER says both in its own words: "Points are not deducted for incorrect answers", and "If you think you know the answer to a question, mark it, even if you are not certain. Go on to the next question and come back later if you have time." So a blank is the only avoidable zero, and triaging is a real skill on this exam in a way it is not on a forward-only test. Our tests behave the same way, including the review grid that shows you what is still blank.

It is not adaptive, and there is no single paper to find the answers to. ACER runs multiple parallel forms and equates them afterwards, placing all versions on one scale. Nothing branches on how you answered the last question. ACER also warns that unscored trial questions may be added with extra time, so a candidate who counted 34 questions where the site said 30 is not going mad.

We cannot tell you your scale score, and neither can anyone else outside ACER. Literacy and numeracy are reported on the Australian Core Skills Framework as a scale score running from about 40 to about 170, with an outcome of "Standard met" or "Standard not met". ACER does not publish how raw marks convert to that scale. Our feedback therefore gives you your raw mark and names the real pass mark as context, clearly labelled as two different things, and never prints a scale score.

There is a report writing component and we do not simulate it. 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, and an onscreen word count. It is rated on selecting relevant information, writing clearly, objectively and in a logical order, forming paragraphs, building complex sentences, and spelling and grammar. At Victoria Police it carries the highest pass mark of the four components, 107 against 105. We have no way to score a 300-word report against those criteria, and a word-count proxy would give you a number that means nothing on the component where the bar is highest, so we describe it here instead of faking it. Our five tests cover the rest of the exam, not all of it.

Our mechanical items are written, not drawn. ACER's MRT-2 is 32 pen-and-ink diagrams. Ours describe each mechanism in words. The reasoning is the same and the reading-a-drawing step is not, so pair our mechanical test with diagram-based practice before the day.

The real exam is desktop-only and supervised. This practice is not. ACER delivers it through the ACER Test App, downloaded onto your own computer at least three days before the session, with ProctorU supervision through the Guardian Browser, a live webcam and microphone, and a minimum screen of 13 inches at 1366x768. Tablets, phones, Chromebooks, Linux, virtual machines, remote-access tools and Microsoft Edge are all unsupported. Our tests work properly on a phone, because revising on a train is a real thing people do, but a phone result here is not comparable to ACER's norms and should not be treated as a prediction of a supervised desktop sitting.

ACER Select's own norms are older than most people assume. ACER Select is normed against a representative group of Year 11 students: 833 students in 46 classes across 38 New South Wales schools, tested in 2002. TAR and MRT norms are better, Australian adult data from 2009 to 2011 and 2010 to 2011 respectively, but still fifteen years old. Our percentiles are against CogniPrep users, which is a third population again, and our feedback says so rather than letting the number look official.