SDPD written exam - what format are the questions and how competitive do you need to score?
I'm applying to the San Diego Police Department and the written exam is next month. I've done a lot of reading about police entry-level testing in general but not much specific to SDPD's format. From what I've gathered it covers reading comprehension, writing ability, and some form of situational judgment - but the exact breakdown isn't clearly published anywhere I've found.
My background is 4 years in the Marine Corps with two deployments, followed by 2 years as a security supervisor. I'm comfortable with structured testing but haven't done anything like a standardized civil service exam since high school. I've been doing about 45 minutes of prep daily for the past 3 weeks.
Is this primarily a reading and writing test where general literacy carries you, or is there legitimate reasoning content that requires real study? Also curious whether 70% is enough to be competitive for the academy, or whether you need to be significantly higher.
The written ability section had me write a short narrative based on a scene description. Practice writing concise, accurate accounts of events - clear subject-verb structure, no opinion, just facts in sequence.
Your military background is going to help a lot on situational judgment. The scenarios favor calm, protocol-following responses over aggressive action, which maps well onto what you learn in a structured military environment.
I scored 89% and got an academy invitation within 6 weeks of testing. Practice tests helped most on reading comprehension because I learned to stop second-guessing and just go with what the passage literally says.
The reading comprehension section is harder than people expect - not because passages are complex, but because wrong answers are very close to the right ones. Don't skim.
A 70% clears the pass/fail threshold but top academy slots tend to go to candidates scoring 85%+ when combined with other assessment scores.