How the PSET information handling section works
Information handling is one of the three sections of the PSET. Police Scotland’s examples use the kind of data a force produces: a bar chart of full-time and part-time officers by division, and a table of ten offences against six court outcomes in a made-up district.
Questions ask you to read a single value, compare two figures, total a row or column, or work out a percentage. Some answers are a number and some are the name of a category, such as the outcome used least.
You write each answer by hand in the box provided.
How to read a table or chart
Before you look for an answer, get your bearings:
- Read the title, the row and column headings, and any note about units.
- Put your finger on the row and column the question names, and read across to where they meet.
- For “how many more”, find both figures first, then subtract.
- For a percentage, check what the whole is: a row total, a column total or the grand total.
- For “which is the lowest” or “highest”, compare totals, not single cells.
Worked example
A table shows calls by shift. Road traffic: early 42, late 58, night 25. Concern for a person: 36, 47, 38. Disturbance: 14, 41, 65. Theft: 28, 22, 6. Other: 30, 32, 16.
How many disturbance calls came in on the night shift? 65. How many calls did the late shift take? 58 + 47 + 41 + 22 + 32 = 200. How many more road traffic calls than theft calls on the early shift? 42 − 28 = 14.
What percentage of all calls came in on the late shift? The three shifts take 150, 200 and 150, so 500 in all, and 200 out of 500 is 40%. Which type of call was least common? Theft, with 56 across the three shifts.
Tips for the real PSET information handling section
- Work through the Birkfield District table in Police Scotland’s mock paper. The answers sheet lets you check your reading of it.
- Treat a dash in a table cell as zero unless the paper says otherwise.
- Read bar charts against the gridlines with a ruler or the edge of your answer sheet.
- Write category answers exactly as they appear in the table.
- Leave enough of the hour for the tables. Rushed table reading is where easy marks go.
Practise PSET information handling on CogniPrep
Our information handling section has 16 questions on three sets of data in 20 minutes, with at least one table and one chart. The charts have gridlines but no values printed on the bars, so you read them as you would on paper, and you type each answer as a figure or a category name. The 16 questions are our estimate of this section’s share of the 49, and your result is shown against a reference line of our own rather than an official pass mark.