3.2 Locating Stated Facts, Conditions, and Exceptions

3.2 Locating Stated Facts, Conditions, and Exceptions

Quick Summary: The most common Occupational Reading item gives you a short passage containing several rules and asks which one governs a stated case. These items are decided by qualifier words — must, may, only, unless, except, at least, no more than, within, after — rather than by topic knowledge. Wrong options are typically built by altering exactly one qualifier, or by attaching a number to the wrong category.

Why qualifiers carry the item

Compare two sentences that differ by a single word:

• "Requests must be submitted through the regional office."
• "Requests may be submitted through the regional office."

The first forbids any other route. The second permits one route among possibly several. An item can be built entirely on that difference, and a candidate reading for gist will miss it.

Build the habit of registering these words as you read:

The and versus or distinction deserves particular attention. "A written request and supervisory approval" requires both. "A written request or supervisory approval" requires only one. Items are built on this difference constantly.

Mapping conditions onto scratch paper

When a passage contains three or more rules, stop trying to hold them in your head. OPM's own preparation tip for the Reasoning assessment — use lists or visuals to organise the information provided in the question — applies just as well here.

A compact format that works under time pressure:

RULE           WHO / WHEN            WHAT RESULTS
General rule   all requests          processed in 10 business days
Exception 1    incomplete request    clock does not start
Exception 2    urgent flag           processed in 3 business days
Boundary       no more than 2 extensions per request

Three lines of notation take about twenty seconds and turn a four-option comparison into a lookup. With five minutes per item, that is time extremely well spent.

Worked example

Passage. The Records Unit reviews access requests in the order received. A request is considered complete when the requester has supplied a signed form and a case number. Incomplete requests are returned to the requester and are not placed in the review queue. Complete requests are reviewed within ten business days. A request marked urgent by a division chief is reviewed within three business days, provided the request is complete. No request may be marked urgent more than once.

Question. A requester submits a signed form without a case number, and a division chief marks the request urgent. What happens?

Work it against the notes:

• Is the request complete? It needs a signed form and a case number. Only the form was supplied, so it is incomplete.
• What happens to incomplete requests? They are returned to the requester and not placed in the review queue.
• Does the urgent marking rescue it? The three-business-day rule applies provided the request is complete. It is not.

Answer: the request is returned to the requester and is not queued. The urgent marking is irrelevant.

Notice how the item is decided by two qualifiers — the and in the completeness definition and the provided attached to the urgent rule. Nothing about records administration is being tested.

The four standard distractor constructions

Once you recognise these, wrong options become visible rather than tempting.

1. The swapped qualifier. The passage says "may"; the option says "must". Or the passage says "at least three"; the option says "exactly three". Always check the modal verb and the boundary word against the text.

2. The misattached number. The passage contains several figures — ten business days, three business days, two extensions. The distractor attaches a real number from the passage to the wrong category. The figure is genuine, which is what makes it convincing.

3. The dropped condition. The passage says a rule applies provided the request is complete; the option states the rule without its condition. This is the most common construction of all, because a stripped conditional reads cleanly and true-ish.

4. The over-generalisation. The passage describes what happens in one stated circumstance; the option asserts it always happens. Watch for always, never, all, any in options when the passage was more measured.

The pointing test

Before you submit, apply one question to your chosen option: can I point at the words in the passage that make this true?

If you can put a finger on the supporting phrase, you have a supported answer. If your justification is "it seems right" or "that's how it normally works", you have an assumption, and Section 4.3 explains why assumptions lose marks on this assessment.