[Postal] 7, Clerical Accuracy: Filing Letter by Letter

Lesson seven of the free Quibank postal exam course, and a warning before anything else. Clerical Accuracy is not a section of the Virtual Entry Assessment four seventy-four. It is the filing and sequencing skill tested by the clerical battery on the clerk side of the Postal Service, and the filing rules themselves come from a records-management standard rather than a postal handbook. Check which exam your own application names.

So if you are sitting the four seventy-four for carrier work, treat this as bonus practice. If you are applying clerk-side, it is the core of your test. Either way the whole thing rests on one comparison rule, and once you have that rule the items stop being a memory exercise and turn mechanical. The rule: compare from the left, one letter at a time, and nothing files before something.

Names also break into indexing units, surname first, then given name, then middle name or initial, and you compare one unit before moving to the next. When one name runs out of letters while the other keeps going, the shorter one files first. The procedure, then. Line the entries up from the left.

Walk along until two letters differ, and that letter decides, so you stop there. If they never differ and one name simply ends, the shorter one wins. If a whole unit matches, move to the next unit and start again. Item one.

Four surnames: Brown with no E, Browne which adds an E, Brownell, and Browner. The correct order is Brown, Browne, Brownell, Browner. Brown is first because it runs out after the N, and nothing files before something. Browne is next for the same reason, stopping at that E while the other two carry on.

Then Brownell and Browner both continue past the E, and there the L beats the R. Item two. Four entries: Hall R, Hall Robert, Hall Robert A, and Hallman R. Which one is filed third?

Work the units. Hall beats Hallman, because the surname runs out first. Inside Hall, the initial R is the start of Robert, so it files ahead of the full name, and Robert files ahead of Robert A, which carries one more unit. The order is Hall R, Hall Robert, Hall Robert A, Hallman R, so the third entry is Hall Robert A.

Item three is the format the exam actually uses. A list is already in order, Sandoval, Santana, Santiago, Santos, and you place one new name into it. The name is Sanz. All five share SAN, so the fourth letter decides, and those letters are D, T, T, T, and Z.

Z follows T, so Sanz goes after every name on the list. Two habits cost people points here. The first is grouping by eye, filing names that look like they belong together instead of comparing them letter by letter. The second is assuming the answer sits somewhere in the middle of the list, because the ends feel like traps.

They are not traps. The slot before the first entry and the slot after the last one are two of the available answers. Recap. Compare from the left, one letter at a time, and stop at the first difference.

Nothing files before something, so the shorter entry goes first. Personal names are units: surname, then given name, then middle initial. An initial files ahead of the full name it begins. And the first and last slots are genuine answers.

Drill the Clerical Accuracy pool free at quibank.com/en/postal-exam. In English, Chinese or Spanish, with no sign-up. Filing items are pure technique, which makes them the easiest points on the test to make automatic.