CA POST common mistakes
CA POST · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Misspelling sound-alike words that the writer hears as correct - writing "there" for "their," "cite" for "site," "principal" for "principle," or "liable" for "libel" in a sentence-level item.
The writer pronounces the word internally and spells by sound; the two words differ only in meaning, not sound, so nothing in the auditory loop triggers doubt. Spell-check and autocorrect also quietly convert some errors, so the writer never builds the habit of checking these pairs.
What to do instead
Build a one-page personal homophone sheet limited to words that appear in report and legal language (their/there/they're, cite/site/sight, principal/principle, liable/libel, counsel/council, peace/piece, breach/break). Drill it in sentence context, not as isolated pairs, and read the sentence aloud substituting each spelling to hear which meaning is intended.
Dropping or doubling consonants and vowels when adding suffixes - writing "occured," "refering," "seperate," "defendent," "judgement" for "judgment."
Phonetic spelling produces one written form that "looks right" because it matches pronunciation; the writer has never consciously learned the consonant-doubling rule or the fixed spellings of high-frequency legal terms, and proofreading for meaning does not catch a word that is merely misspelled.
What to do instead
Learn the CVC doubling rule (occur → occurred, refer → referring) and treat a short list of fixed legal spellings (judgment, defendant, affidavit, subpoena, misdemeanor) as memorization items. Practice by dictation - have someone read 20 of these words while you write them - because dictation tests production, not recognition.
Selecting the answer choice that sounds most formal or official rather than the one whose meaning fits the sentence - picking "militate" for "mitigate," "apprehend" for "comprehend," or "venal" for "venial."
In written-expression items the distractors are deliberately drawn from the same register as the correct answer, and a test-taker under time pressure substitutes a feeling of familiarity ("I've seen that word in reports") for an actual definition.
What to do instead
For every new word, write a definition in your own words plus one original sentence using it, and study confusable words as opposed pairs rather than singly (mitigate/militate, venal/venial, precedent/precedence). If you cannot state the word's meaning before looking at the choices, treat the item as a coin flip and move on.
Locking onto the most familiar meaning of a multiple-meaning word and choosing a synonym for that sense, even when the surrounding sentence forces a different sense (e.g., "the officer was relieved" - from duty, not from anxiety).
High-frequency senses are retrieved automatically on sight of the word, and the recognition feels like comprehension, so the reader stops before checking how the word functions in this particular sentence.
What to do instead
Cover the answer choices, read the sentence, and write your own synonym in the margin first; then match your synonym to the choices. If more than one choice survives, substitute each back into the sentence and read it whole to detect the mismatch.
Answering comprehension items from general knowledge, personal experience, or what "should" be true about a police scenario instead of what the passage actually states.
Candidates with subject-matter background find the plausible-but-unsupported choices highly attractive; the answer feels obviously right, so the passage is never checked. Test writers routinely build distractors out of accurate real-world statements that the passage does not contain.
What to do instead
Force a physical evidence step: go back to the passage and underline the specific sentence that supports the chosen answer, or reject it. If you cannot point to a line, the choice is wrong regardless of whether it is true in real life.
Choosing a statement that is true according to the passage but does not answer the question asked, and misreading negative stems such as "EXCEPT" or "NOT" as positive ones.
The stem is skimmed in a few seconds while the choices are read carefully, so the criterion by which choices are judged is never firmly set; a true statement satisfies the vague goal of "find the right answer."
What to do instead
Before reading any choices, cover them, read the stem, and restate it to yourself as a question ("Which one is NOT stated?"). Mark the operative word on the page. For EXCEPT items, plan to select the one choice that the passage supports and eliminate the other three.
Filling a cloze blank with a connector that reads smoothly in the blank's own sentence but contradicts the paragraph's logic - writing "however" where the sentences agree, or "therefore" where they contrast.
The blank's sentence is read in isolation; transitional words are grammatical glue that can be plausible in almost any sentence, so local fluency substitutes for global coherence.
What to do instead
Read the entire paragraph, including the blank, before looking at the options. Label the relationship between the blank's sentence and the previous one in the margin - addition, contrast, cause, example, sequence - and only then choose the word that encodes that relationship.
Choosing a blank option on meaning alone and never checking grammatical agreement - verb tense against the surrounding paragraph, singular/plural agreement, or pronoun number.
Cloze items feel like vocabulary questions, so attention goes to semantics; grammar is processed automatically in one's own writing and is therefore not consciously inspected on a test.
What to do instead
After selecting, read the completed sentence back and run three checks: does the verb tense match the paragraph's time frame, does the subject agree in number, and does every pronoun have a clear singular or plural antecedent? Any option that fails a check is eliminated even if the meaning is attractive.
Writing run-on sentences and comma splices - joining three or four complete thoughts with commas and "and" or "and then" into a single 40-word sentence.
Candidates transcribe the way they narrate events aloud, where pauses carry the structure; on paper the pauses become commas and the sentence never closes. It also mimics a compressed "report style" the writer has seen and mistaken for good writing.
What to do instead
Apply one idea per sentence: after drafting, put a period at every place you would take a breath or say "and then," then re-read to confirm each resulting sentence has its own subject and verb. Aim for an average of roughly 15–20 words and split anything past 25.
Leaving modifiers and pronouns unattached - writing "After fleeing on foot, the officer contacted the suspect" or "The officer spoke to the witness and he was uncooperative," where the reader cannot tell who did what.
The writer holds the intended meaning in memory and does not notice that the sentence, read cold, assigns the action to the wrong noun; a pronoun with two possible antecedents is unambiguous to the person who already knows the answer.
What to do instead
Run a "who did what" test on each sentence: name the actor explicitly in every clause and place the modifier immediately next to the word it describes. Where a pronoun could refer to two nouns, repeat the noun instead - a repeated name is never a clarity error.