Passing the Police Officer Exam: Police coding questions

The third type of uncommon question that sometimes appears on the Police Officer Exam is the police coding question.  Each of these questions will ask you to interpret a passage using a series of codes.  These questions are much less common than most of the other questions mentioned in this guide, and you probably will not see these questions on the exam.  In fact, if police coding questions are included on the version of the exam that you are taking, there is no need for you to spend a large amount of time preparing for these questions.  You should only see a few of these questions on the exam, and they are usually straightforward.  However, there are several things that you may want to keep in mind in case these questions actually do appear on the exam.
 
Read and interpret
The police coding questions that sometimes appear on the exam are asking you to read and interpret the information that is right in front of you and they are not asking you to do anything else.  Many exam-takers panic because the codes make the questions look complicated.  You will not be required to memorize anything or know anything about the subject in order to answer these questions because each question will ask you to translate each code in order to provide a detail or identify the name of a specific person, place, type of vehicle, crime that is present in the situation.
 
Read the question first
Read the questions associated with a police coding passage before you read the passage.  This will allow you to identify the codes that you need to pay special attention to in order to find the correct answer.  The police coding questions may use codes for a number of different elements in the passage.  You may see codes used for virtually anything including any person, place, vehicle, crime, or anything else of importance in the passage.  You will waste a lot of time if you don't know what you are looking for in the passage.
 
Multiple codes
Some of the sentences will contain more than one code.  These sentences can be extremely confusing because they make it difficult to remember which code represents which information.  Many of the codes use a single number/letter to represent information, and there may be multiple codes that are only slightly different in the same passage.  It is very easy to confuse the codes.  
 
Example: Sentence states:'D reported that B states that she was waiting at the park for C when she was attacked by A.'  
 
Codes for this example: A = Unidentified AttackerB = Mrs. Victoria DalesC = Mr. Vincent DalesD = Officer Steven Jones
 
Question asks:
'Who was the victim waiting for?' 
 Options:(A) Vincent Dales(B) Unidentified Attacker(C) Mrs. Victoria Dales(D) Officer Steven Jones
 
The correct answer to this question is option 'A': the passage states that the victim or letter B, Mrs. Victoria Dales, was waiting for C or Mr. Vincent Dales when she was attacked.  This answer is obvious (you can find the answer simply by reading the sentence, the codes, and the question), but a passage filled with a series of sentences like this might be confusing.