A police mock board is a practice run of the real promotion board, sat before the day so the day itself isn’t the first time you do one. For years a police mock board meant paying an experienced officer or a recruitment firm to play the panel, usually a few hundred pounds for one sitting.
That option still exists. It’s no longer the only one.
What a mock board is for
The board is spoken, and it’s probed. A mock board rehearses how you deliver and defend an answer, not just the words you wrote down. The words are step one, and if you’re still building them our guide on how to write a STARR answer covers that. Delivery is the next step, and it’s the one most officers skip.
A good mock board tests whether your structure holds when you speak it, whether your evidence is specific enough to score, whether you’re pitched at the right rank, and how you cope when someone pushes back. All of it is measured against the CVF 2024 framework your panel uses on the day.
The traditional human mock board
The familiar version is a panel of experienced officers, in person or over a video call, for an hour or so, with feedback afterwards. It’s genuinely useful. A real person reading you back is hard to beat for honesty.
It’s also expensive and one off. A single human mock board often costs around £380, you sit it on their diary rather than yours, and the quality depends entirely on who you get. For an officer working shifts with a board date looming, booking even one can be a struggle.
How an AI mock board works
An AI mock board does the same job without the booking. A voiced panel asks rank calibrated questions out loud, listens to your spoken answer, asks a follow up on what you actually said, keeps real board timings, and marks you against the Competency and Values Framework at your target rank. You answer by speaking, exactly as you will on the day.
It runs in your browser, so you can sit one whenever it suits you and, crucially, sit it again. State6’s AI Mock Board marks every answer out of five and writes a full debrief, and because the feedback is tied to the rank, an answer pitched too low is capped no matter how smooth it sounds. If you want to see how far the bar moves between ranks, start with what panels look for at sergeant level.
Why practising out loud matters
A strong written answer can collapse the moment you say it under pressure. The probe finds the gap you talked around, and a memorised script rarely survives the follow up. The questions can also turn on your force’s HMICFRS inspection picture, which a panel expects you to be aware of.
Sit a mock board early, not the week before. The value is in finding the cracks while you’ve still got time to fix them, and in doing it often enough that the real board feels familiar.
For the full picture of the process, from how the NPPF works to what panels score at each rank, see the complete guide to UK police promotion boards.