Building Your Own Social Work Exam Practice Questions

One inexpensive way to prepare for the ASWB exam is to read through the Eye on Ethics columns in Social Work Today. Most contain just the kind of tricky social work rock-and-a-hard-place situation that you'll see on the licensing exam. No, they're not practice questions. But they could be practice questions. It wouldn't be a huge surprise to learn that exam writers were turning to the column for ideas about what to put on the test.

Take, for example, this recent column, Treating Colleagues with Respect in the Digital Age. The opening paragraphs are like a social work exam vignette without the question mark:

Last week I received an unusual telephone call from an administrator of a state social work licensing board. She explained that the board had received a complaint filed by one social worker against another. "This certainly is a novel complaint," the caller said. "We've never seen one like this before. I'm calling you to find out if you've heard of similar cases and know of any guidelines that might be relevant.

"Here's what apparently happened," the caller continued. "The complainant and respondent work at the same mental health center. The complainant is the respondent's supervisor. The respondent became quite angry with her supervisor after the supervisor included some negative comments in the respondent's annual review. According to the complaint filed with us by the supervisor, the respondent 'posted a handful of horribly nasty comments about me on her Facebook site. She accused me publicly of being incompetent and unethical. I don't think she realized that I had access to her Facebook postings.'"

I learned that the complaint the supervisor filed with the social work licensing board included verbatim excerpts from the Facebook postings. They are not pretty.

It doesn't take much imagination to flip things around into question form. An administrator receives a complaint... and so on about a social worker's bad-mouthing a supervisor on social media. What is the BEST course for the administrator to take?

Coming up with distractors is the trickier part of this exercise. Maybe something like...

A) Demand that the social worker remove the social media posts.

B) Refer the defamation to the state licensing board.

C) Reassign the social worker to a different supervisor.

D) Set a meeting for the social worker and supervisor to discuss the incident.

What answer do you like best? A probably doesn't take things far enough. B takes them too far--or jumps ahead in the process. C avoids the conflict altogether and doesn't address the issues at hand. That leaves D as the best of the offered choices. Maybe it's not the actual BEST course, but it's what you've got to work with here. If this were on the exam, that'd be a good pick. Then move on to the next...

Want more reading on the topic? Here's everything you need: the NASW Code of Ethics.