POST Setting Priorities: Ranking Three Events at a Time

Sub-test 4 of the POST Entry-Level Dispatcher Selection Test Battery is about triage, and like the unit assignment test next to it, the rules you triage by are handed to you rather than known in advance.

What it involves

POST's description: "the examinee is given a novel set of rules to read and follow in order to assign priority codes to events. The events are presented in sets of three. A multiple-choice response format is used to designate the priority of events in each set as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd priority."

So you are not scoring events on an absolute scale. You are ranking three against each other, repeatedly.

The rule structure

POST's illustrative rule set is a three-tier hierarchy:

• Code A, highest priority — events that involve injury or are life threatening.
• Code B, second priority — events that involve property loss or damage.
• Code C, lowest priority — other events that do not involve injury, threat to life, property loss or damage.

And its worked example: a man breaking into an unoccupied house is B; two neighbours currently involved in a fistfight is A; a caller requesting information about parking permits is C.

Notice what the burglary example teaches. An unoccupied house means no one is at risk, so property damage governs and it takes second place behind a fistfight. If you had ranked on how serious the crime sounds, or on how upset the caller would be, you would have got it wrong. The rule asks one question — is there injury or threat to life — and the answer decides the tier before anything else is considered.

Where candidates lose marks

• Substituting judgement for the rule. The test gives you a hierarchy and then offers events where instinct pulls a different way. Instinct is what it is testing against.
• Ranking by severity of the crime rather than by the stated criterion. A serious offence with nobody in danger sits below a minor one where someone might be hurt, if the rules say so.
• Missing the word that changes the tier. "Unoccupied", "currently", "was" versus "is" — one word usually decides which tier an event falls into.
• Breaking ties badly. When two events land in the same tier, you still have to order them, so read for the detail that separates them rather than guessing.

How to work it

Read all three events before assigning anything. Classify each into its tier on the single governing criterion, then order within tiers. Working one event at a time invites you to commit to a first priority before you have seen the event that should have taken it.

Watch the tense and the status words. In the worked example, the fistfight is described as one the neighbours are "currently involved in" — present, ongoing, someone can be hurt now. Past-tense events with the parties gone read very differently under the same rules.

What it is measuring

POST places this among the reasoning abilities: "the ability to apply general rules to specific problems to attain logical answers; and the ability to correctly follow rules to arrange things or actions in a certain order." That is a fair description of dispatch triage, where the priority scheme comes from the agency and your job is to apply it consistently under load rather than to invent it.

Practising it

Our prioritisation drill presents events against a stated rule set and asks you to order them, with the rules varying between runs so that you are practising the application rather than memorising an answer key. Evaluating facts trains the same discipline of answering strictly from what is stated.

For the job-side version of the same problem, prioritising simultaneous incidents covers how this works on a live console. The POST battery guide covers all eleven sub-tests.

The Examinee Guide is dated February 1996 and is the document POST publishes for candidates. Confirm the current arrangements with the agency testing you.

Sources

• California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, POST Entry-Level Dispatcher Selection Test Battery: Examinee Guide (February 1996)
• California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, Public Safety Dispatcher Entry-Level Test Battery: Applicant FAQs

The POST Entry-Level Dispatcher Selection Test Battery is administered by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. DispatchDrills is an independent practice provider and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by California POST. We do not reproduce exam content; every example in our material is original and illustrative.

Common questions

What is the Setting Priorities test?

Sub-test 4 of the POST dispatcher battery. You apply a given set of priority codes to events presented in sets of three and rank them first, second and third.

Do I need to know real priority codes?

No. The rule set is novel and supplied with the test.

What is the usual hierarchy?

In POST's illustrative rules: injury or threat to life first, property loss or damage second, everything else third.

Why is a burglary ranked below a fistfight?

In POST's own example the house is unoccupied, so nobody is at risk and the event falls into the property tier, while an ongoing fistfight involves potential injury.

What ability does it measure?

Reasoning — applying general rules to specific problems and following rules to arrange things in order.