What Score Do You Need to Pass the Police Exam?

Written & reviewed by the Quibank editorial team · Last reviewed 2026-09-28 · Editorial standards

There is no single passing score on the police written exam, because there is no single police written exam. Depending on which agency you apply to, the number that decides your fate is a 42, a 70, three separate section scores, or a rank on a list — and in California it is not a percentage of questions at all.

That is not a hedge. Four real examples, all from official documents: the California POST test reports a standardized T-score and the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office asks for 42; the NYPD requires "a score of at least 70%" and then ranks you; the San Francisco Police Department accepts either a POST T-score of 42 or a FrontLine National result with separate cut scores of 60 on video, 70 on writing and 70 on reading; and New York State's entry-level series runs five hours. Before you can pick a target score, you have to find out which instrument you are sitting.

California's 42 is not 42 percent

The POST Entry-Level Law Enforcement Test Battery (PELLETB) does not report the number of questions you answered correctly. POST's Applicant Preparation Guide explains that raw scores are converted into a "T-score" — a standardized score placed on a bell curve "with a midpoint (average) of 50 and a standard deviation of ten." Scores of 40 or below are labelled below average, 60 or above are above average, and the guide's key sentence is that "the likelihood of successful academy completion increases for every point scored above 42."

Notice what POST does not say: it never declares a passing score. The 42 is a research finding about academy success that agencies have adopted as a hiring floor. Humboldt County's sheriff's office states flatly that a T-score of 42 is required, and San Francisco accepts a T-score of 42 or higher. Because the score describes where you sit against other applicants rather than what fraction you got right, POST publishes no raw-score equivalent — there is no "you needed 48 of 70 questions" to work backwards from.

The CLOZE section is gone, and older study material hasn't caught up

If any guide you are using drills CLOZE passages — the exercise where letters are stripped out of a paragraph and you reconstruct the missing words — it predates the current test. The Applicant Preparation Guide states it directly: "the CLOZE reading comprehension sub-test is no longer part of the PELLETB, effective January 1, 2025."

What is left is narrower than most candidates expect. The writing test carries between 45 and 54 items across three sub-tests — clarity (picking the most clearly written of four sentences), spelling, and vocabulary — each running 15 to 18 items. Reading comprehension adds 20 to 24 items. POST's applicant FAQ allows two and a half hours for the whole thing. There is no mathematics section, no situational-judgment section and no memory section on the PELLETB. It is, in POST's own framing, a language aptitude test.

One tactical detail from the same guide: it tells candidates that "it is to your advantage to answer all questions." Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so a blank is strictly worse than a guess — skip the item that is eating your clock, but come back and fill it.

Your agency may test abilities California doesn't test at all

New York State's Department of Civil Service publishes a guide to its entry-level police officer series, and the format barely resembles California's. The written test "generally has an overall time allowance of 5 hours." It opens with a Memory Booklet: you get five minutes to study a story, you are not allowed to take notes, the booklet is collected, and then you answer questions about it. Another section hands you a page of an officer's incident notes and asks which of four restatements presents the facts most clearly and accurately.

The NYPD's own Notice of Examination lists the abilities its computer-based test may draw on, and two of them are Spatial Orientation and Visualization — imagining how an object or pattern looks "after certain changes, such as unfolding or rotation," used, the notice says, to identify people who have changed their appearance. No arithmetic ability appears in that list at all, though information ordering can involve putting mathematical operations in sequence.

Then compare Utah. Salt Lake City PD's page on the N.P.O.S.T. describes "four timed sections: math, reading comprehension, grammar and incident report writing," each on its own clock: 20 math questions in 20 minutes, 25 reading questions in 25 minutes, 20 grammar questions in 15 minutes, and 10 incident-report-writing questions in 15 minutes. The practical consequence is that "study math for the police test" is excellent advice for an N.P.O.S.T. agency and wasted effort for a PELLETB or New York State candidate.

Retake rules vary more than the tests do

California's rule is a flat cooling-off period: POST's applicant FAQ says "you must wait for a period of 30 calendar days before taking the exam again." Utah's is structured completely differently. Salt Lake City PD states that candidates cannot retake the same version of the N.P.O.S.T. for sixty days, but alternate versions — A, B or C — can be taken inside that window, with a limit of two attempts on the same version in any 12-month period. Better still, if you test more than once you "may submit your results with your best score. We do not need to use your most recent score."

Score shelf life is the place two official documents will contradict each other, so read both. POST's FAQ says "a score on the POST test has no shelf life" and that you can send a prior department letter to a new employer, which other departments "have the discretion of accepting." San Francisco, one of those departments, exercises that discretion by accepting a POST written taken within the last two years. Plan for the shorter window.

Candidates comparing scores online are comparing different rulers

Massachusetts candidates on the MassCops forum post civil-service numbers that look nothing like a T-score. In the board's 2023 Civil Service Scores thread, participants report a 92.14, an 83 from 2021 that did not cut it for the State Police, and a 98.9 from 2017 that placed the poster around 40th on the State Police list. The most useful line in the thread is a veteran's summary that every exam has its own scale: the exam he was hired from required at least a 98 to be considered, and a few exams later an 85 was considered great. In the 2021 scores poll on the same board, reported results clustered in the 76-85 range and a 93 was described as the highest anyone had heard of.

None of those numbers transfer. A Massachusetts 92 and a California 42 are statements about different tests on different scales. Treat forum score threads as evidence about one jurisdiction in one year — and remember that the people who volunteer their scores are disproportionately the people happy with them.

Six things to confirm before you build a study plan

Every one of these is answered in your agency's recruitment announcement or by its recruiter, and every one changes how you should spend your study hours.

Which instrument is it — PELLETB, FrontLine National, N.P.O.S.T., an NCJOSI-style inventory, a state civil-service series, or the department's own test?
Is the result a pass/fail cut score, a rank on an eligible list, or both?
Are there separate cut scores per section? San Francisco's FrontLine route requires 60 on video, 70 on writing and 70 on reading — a strong overall performance with one weak section does not pass.
How soon can you retest, and does taking a different version reset the clock the way it does in Utah but not in California?
How long does the score stay usable, and will a second agency accept it? Ask the receiving department, not the state body that scored you.
Do any credits have to be claimed on test day? The NYPD adds ten points for New York City residency credit, and its notice warns that requests "cannot be accepted after the eligible list is established" — the same deadline applies to veterans' preference and legacy credits.

Where to put your hours

Across every version of this exam, the two abilities that appear in all of them are reading dense written material accurately and writing a clear sentence under time pressure. Drilling reading comprehension and grammar is therefore never wasted, while memory work, spatial rotation and arithmetic are worth the effort only once you know your test contains them.

Our free police practice covers reading comprehension, writing and grammar, basic mathematics, and reasoning and judgment, so you can work the sections your announcement actually names and skip the ones it doesn't.

Try the free police exam practice test →