How the CritiCall Decision Making test works
A short message describes an incident, such as a man throwing rocks at children. Four symbols stand for Police, Fire, EMS and Utility. You move the cursor to one and click once. A wrong agency scores nothing, and so does an answer given more than 15 seconds after the message first appeared.
You must decide by Biddle’s four rules only, not by what your local service would do. Biddle’s candidate guide tells you to learn the rules before the test, so expect to work from memory. The same messages also pop up while you work on other CritiCall modules, such as data entry, so the rules matter across the whole sitting.
The four CritiCall decision rules
These are Biddle’s rules, shortened. Learn them until you can say them without looking:
- Police: someone is attempting, threatening or has managed to physically harm another person, or is causing or has caused harm to another person’s property.
- Fire: immediate signs of a fire in progress, such as flames or smoke; a fire alarm sounding; or a person who is trapped or confined and needs to be rescued or released.
- EMS: an emergency medical condition that needs intervention by medically trained personnel.
- Utility: broken or malfunctioning public water systems, electric power systems (including power lines, streetlights and traffic signals), natural gas used for home heating, or blocked sewer drainpipes.
How to decide in under 15 seconds
Run the same three checks on every message:
- Find the one fact that matters: an injury, flames, a person trapped, harm to a person or property, or a broken public service.
- Match that fact to the rule that names it. Ignore anything in the message that a rule does not mention.
- Click once and move on. A guess inside the window can score; no answer cannot.
Worked examples
“Someone is smashing the windows of a parked car.” Nobody is hurt, but a person is causing harm to another person’s property, so the answer is Police.
“A traffic signal at Main and 4th is dark in every direction.” Traffic signals are named in the Utility rule, so the answer is Utility, even though it sounds like a job for traffic police.
“A woman is stuck in a lift between floors. She is not injured.” There is no fire and no medical condition, but she is confined and needs releasing, which the Fire rule covers. The answer is Fire.
Tips for the real Decision Making test
- Learn the rules word for word from Biddle’s candidate guide, and test yourself on made-up incidents until each answer is instant.
- Watch for the cases your instinct gets wrong: traffic signals and streetlights are Utility, and a person trapped without injury is Fire.
- During other modules, deal with each message as soon as it appears, then go straight back to where you were.
- Use only a single left click, as the guide asks. Practise clicking small targets with a mouse if you mostly use a trackpad.
- Take the real test on a laptop or desktop. TestGenius says some modules do not work on phones or tablets.
Practise CritiCall Decision Making on CogniPrep
Our version shows the four rules before you start, then hides them and sends 30 emergency messages one at a time, each open for 15 seconds, with a short random gap between them. There is no countdown on screen. You get the percentage you dispatched correctly in time, with your misses split into wrong agencies and timeouts. The 15 seconds are Biddle’s; the count of 30 is ours, because Biddle does not publish one.