NAPOLCOM exam coverage: the four areas, and what is actually in each.

The PNP Entrance Examination is the eligibility exam for appointment as Patrolman or Patrolwoman. It is open to civilians who meet the qualifications and to patrol officers holding a temporary appointment for want of eligibility. NAPOLCOM administers it twice a year through its regional offices, and describes its scope in the same four terms every cycle.

Three of those areas are the general-ability areas any government examination tests. The fourth is where the paper becomes a police exam. If you have reviewed for the Civil Service Examination, roughly three quarters of that work carries over; the general information area is the part you have not studied before.

This is the point where most reviewer sites overstate what they know. NAPOLCOM's examination announcements and its regional office pages describe the areas and the passing score. They do not publish the number of items per area, and the total has moved between examination cycles.

The most common figure in secondary sources is 150 items in three hours. At least one reviewer describes a five-subtest paper of 175 items that includes spatial reasoning and a police-concepts section. Neither figure appears in a NAPOLCOM publication we could find, so treat both as reports rather than rules.

What this means for your review: prepare for a paper of around 150 to 175 objective items in three hours, expect general information to be a substantial block rather than a handful of questions, and do not build your strategy on an exact split that may not survive the next announcement. Pacing is the skill that transfers regardless: at 150 items in 180 minutes you have about 72 seconds per item, and at 175 you have about 62.

This is the area that decides whether prior review helps. It is also the most studyable, because the material is a fixed body of documents rather than a skill. The items ask about facts a future officer is expected to know: who created the PNP and when, what the Commission's authority over it is, what the ranks are, what the Constitution guarantees the people the police serve, and how the criminal justice system fits together.

Three laws are the spine of the area. RA 6975, the DILG Act of 1990, created the PNP under the Department of the Interior and Local Government and placed it under the administrative control of the National Police Commission. RA 8551, the PNP Reform and Reorganization Act of 1998, set the qualification standards for appointment, created the Internal Affairs Service, and reshaped promotion and discipline. RA 11200, signed in February 2019, renamed the ranks from the old Police Officer and Inspector series to the Patrolman-to-Police General ladder used today.

Around those sit the 1987 Constitution, in particular Article III (the Bill of Rights) and Article XVI, Section 6, which requires one national, civilian police force administered and controlled by a national police commission; the five pillars of the criminal justice system, which are law enforcement, prosecution, courts, corrections and the community; and RA 6713, the Code of Conduct for public officials, which the examination treats as the baseline of ethics for anyone entering government service.

Verbal reasoning is English at secondary-school level: the meaning of a word in a sentence, whether a sentence is grammatically correct, which word completes a sentence, and what a short passage says or implies. It is the largest skills area and the most predictable, and vocabulary in particular is the topic where points are earned before exam day rather than during it.

Quantitative reasoning is arithmetic and basic algebra with no calculator: operations on whole numbers, fractions and decimals, percentages and ratios, simple equations, word problems, and number sequences. The items use round numbers precisely because nobody has a calculator, which is why estimation eliminates two or three options on many of them before you compute anything.

Logical reasoning tests whether a conclusion follows from what you were given: analogies that ask you to name a relationship between two words and find the pair that shares it, deductions from a short set of statements, ordering and seating arrangements, and patterns in sequences of numbers, letters or figures. It is the area most examinees assume cannot be studied for, and it is the one that most rewards a fixed method.

Weight your time by where the marks are and by what you can change. General information converts reading almost directly into marks, so it deserves a fixed block of your schedule from the first week rather than a glance in the last. Verbal reasoning rewards a daily word list and a short grammar rule set. Quantitative reasoning rewards drilling the fundamentals by hand until they are automatic. Logical reasoning rewards learning the handful of relationship types and running the same checklist on every pattern item.

Then sit the whole thing under a clock. A three-hour objective paper is a pacing exam as much as a knowledge exam, and the pass rate, under a third in the April 2026 sittings, says most examinees walk in without having done that once. The free diagnostic on this site is a 40-item paper across all four areas with a pass/fail verdict and your weakest area named; it exists to tell you where the reading should start.