Free NBCC NCE-ABE Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 4

Within the group counseling process, counselors are expected to recognize predictable emotional patterns that appear at different developmental stages of a group. According to the work behaviors related to group facilitation, counselors must understand how members respond as the group moves toward closure.

During the termination stage, members commonly experience mixed emotions, including:

Sadness, because they are separating from the support, cohesion, and interpersonal connections formed within the group.

Relief, because the formal group work is ending and members may feel a sense of completion or accomplishment.

These emotions reflect a normal and expected part of group development, and the counselor’s role is to help members process these feelings, consolidate learning, and prepare to apply insights outside the group.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B. Transition stage: Typically involves anxiety, resistance, conflict, and testing of boundaries, not the concluding emotions associated with group completion.

C. Formative (initial) stage: Characterized by orientation, confusion, dependency, and uncertainty, not feelings tied to ending.

D. Production (working) stage: Marked by cohesion, trust, productive work, and deep exploration, not termination-related emotions.

This understanding fits the NBCC Counselor Work Behavior Areas’ expectation that counselors demonstrate competence in group development, emotional processing, and effective intervention throughout all stages of group work.

Transference is a core relationship phenomenon in counseling in which a client unconsciously redirects feelings, expectations, and patterns from important early relationships (often parents or caregivers) onto the counselor. A common form of this is when the client begins to relate to the counselor as if the counselor were a parental figure—idealized, critical, abandoning, overprotective, or nurturing in ways that mirror their early experiences.

This makes B the best answer: it captures the classic understanding of transference as the client viewing and reacting to the counselor in a parental role.

A (wanting a counselor who shares their culture) is a preference about counselor characteristics and is more related to cultural competence and matching, not transference.

C (developing strong emotions) is too broad; clients can have strong feelings without it being transference. Transference specifically involves repetition of earlier relational patterns.

D (wanting a counselor with the same diagnosis) is again a preference for perceived similarity, not an unconscious displacement of past relationship dynamics.

Recognizing and working with transference appropriately is part of the counselor’s core counseling attributes (self-awareness, relationship skills, and understanding of interpersonal processes) as outlined in professional counselor work behaviors.

The term “outsider witness groups” comes specifically from narrative therapy. In this approach, clients tell and re-author their stories, and selected others (outsider witnesses) listen to these stories and then respond by sharing what moved or resonated with them. This process:

Brings in social resources and supportive witnesses.

Strengthens the client’s preferred identity and alternative story.

Helps the client feel seen and supported in a broader community context.

Thus, option D. Narrative therapy is correct.

Adlerian therapy (A) uses family constellation, early recollections, and encouragement, but not outsider witness groups as a standard technique.

Gestalt therapy (B) emphasizes experiential awareness, here-and-now work, and empty-chair techniques.

Community psychology (C) incorporates social systems and resources but does not specifically use “outsider witness groups” as conceptualized in narrative therapy.

NBCC Counselor Work Behaviors expect counselors to know the distinctive concepts and methods of major counseling theories, including narrative therapy’s use of outsider witnesses to support client change.

When working with adolescents on career and educational goals, counselors are expected to examine realistic indicators of readiness and likelihood of success in a chosen field. For highly demanding professions such as medicine, the best single indicator of future academic success is the client’s previous academic record, including grades, rigor of coursework, and performance in relevant subjects (especially science and math).

Previous academic record (D) shows how the client has already handled structured academic demands over time, which closely parallels the long, intensive training path for physicians.

Aptitude test scores (A) reflect potential, but they are more abstract and less predictive than an established history of strong academic performance when it comes to long-term professional training.

Achievement test scores (B) focus on specific content knowledge at a given point in time, but do not give as rich a picture as an ongoing academic record.

Socioeconomic situation (C) may influence access to opportunities and support, but ethically, counselors should not treat it as the main determinant of whether the goal is realistic; instead, it becomes part of planning supports and resources, not the primary filter for possibility.

Therefore, in evaluating the likelihood of successfully becoming a physician, the previous academic record is the most appropriate focus, making D correct.

Within the Areas of Clinical Focus work behavior area, counselors are expected to know evidence-based treatments for specific clinical conditions, including personality disorders.

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) (Option C) was originally developed by Marsha Linehan specifically to treat chronically suicidal individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). DBT integrates:

Cognitive-behavioral strategies for behavior change,

Acceptance-based strategies (e.g., mindfulness),

A dialectical framework balancing acceptance and change.

The model includes:

Individual therapy,

Group skills training (mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness),

Phone coaching,

Consultation team for therapists.

These features reflect the NBCC-aligned work behavior expectation that counselors understand appropriate, validated modalities for complex clinical presentations such as BPD.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Analytical behavioral analysis – This is not the recognized model associated with the original treatment of BPD.

B. Cognitive behavioral therapy – While DBT evolved from CBT and CBT techniques are useful with many disorders, standard CBT was not specifically designed as the original, specialized treatment protocol for BPD.

D. Transactional analysis – A distinct theoretical model focusing on ego states and life scripts; it is not the empirically established, original treatment model for BPD.

Counselors working with personality disorders are expected to identify and, when within their scope, apply or refer for treatments such as DBT, which are designed and researched for these clinical populations.

In intake and assessment, counselors are expected to recognize possible indicators of psychotic symptoms and to follow up with focused questioning. A report that “everyone is always speaking at once” suggests that the client may be experiencing perceptual disturbances involving hearing voices, which is characteristic of auditory hallucinations.

The counselor’s responsibility, as outlined in assessment-related work behaviors, is to:

Identify verbal cues suggesting hallucinations or other psychotic features.

Conduct further assessment to clarify the nature, frequency, and impact of these experiences.

Determine risk, functional impairment, and the need for referral or coordinated care.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Visual hallucinations involve seeing things (people, objects, lights) that are not present; the client’s description specifically involves “speaking,” which is auditory.

C. Delusions of grandeur are fixed false beliefs about having exceptional power, importance, or identity, not a perception that many voices are speaking at once.

D. Tactile hallucinations involve feeling physical sensations (e.g., bugs crawling on the skin) that are not actually occurring.

This is consistent with NBCC Counselor Work Behavior Areas, which emphasize accurate symptom recognition and diagnostic assessment as foundational to responsible counseling practice.

Within Professional Practice and Ethics, counselors are expected to monitor and evaluate their own effectiveness, seek feedback, and engage in ongoing professional development to improve their practice.

In this scenario, the counselor:

Asks for anonymous written comments after each session

Focuses specifically on the counselor’s own behaviors in the group

Takes steps to protect confidentiality (having comments typed by a third party)

This clearly frames the feedback as a tool for the counselor to evaluate and improve their own performance, which is an example of self-evaluation.

Group stage evaluation (A) would focus on where the group is developmentally (forming, storming, norming, etc.), not primarily on the counselor’s behavior.

Outcome evaluation (B) assesses whether client or group goals are being met (symptom reduction, improved functioning), not how the counselor acted.

Process gradient scaling (D) is not what’s being described here; this is not a formal scaling or rating method of session process variables.

Therefore, the process is best understood as self-evaluation, making C the correct answer.

Career construction counseling (Savickas) is a narrative, meaning-based approach to career development. Its central activity is helping clients tell, explore, and organize their life stories in a way that reveals recurring life themes and preferred ways of being in the world. These themes then guide career choices and roles that feel coherent and meaningful.

Thus, option C. Identifying life themes is correct, as it captures the core narrative task of career construction counseling.

A. Analyzing temperament fits more with trait-based or psychometric approaches.

B. Documenting experience may occur, but it is secondary to making sense of those experiences through themes.

D. Practicing interview skills is a useful career skill-building task but is not the central activity of career construction counseling.

NBCC Counselor Work Behavior Areas expect counselors to understand major career theories and approaches, including narrative and constructivist models that emphasize life themes, meaning-making, and storytelling in career development.

The scenario describes an adult who, instead of punishing the child in a purely behavioristic way, talks with the child about how their behavior affects others and helps the child recognize their own feelings and others’ feelings. This is characteristic of an inductive discipline approach, which emphasizes:

Helping the child understand the consequences of their actions on other people.

Developing empathy, moral reasoning, and internalized values.

Encouraging the child to take responsibility and regulate behavior from within.

Option B, the inductive approach, matches this style. It is often contrasted with more power-assertive or purely consequence-based methods.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Operant conditioning focuses on behavior change through reinforcement and punishment, typically without explicit emphasis on the child’s understanding of others’ feelings.

C. Deductive approach generally refers to reasoning from general principles to specific cases and is not the standard term used to describe this kind of discipline strategy.

D. Intermittent reinforcement refers to a schedule in which behaviors are reinforced only some of the time, a concept from learning theory that does not describe the empathic, discussion-based process in the scenario.

This fits with NBCC Counselor Work Behavior Areas under clinical focus with children and families, where counselors are expected to understand and, when appropriate, teach or model developmentally sensitive discipline practices that foster empathy, prosocial behavior, and internalized self-control.

Ratio IQs (mental age ÷ chronological age × 100) create interpretation problems, especially for adults, because mental age does not increase steadily across the lifespan. Modern intelligence testing instead uses deviation IQs, which:

Compare an individual’s performance to that of their age-based normative group.

Use a fixed mean (typically 100) and standard deviation (often 15 or 16) to express how far above or below the average a person’s score falls.

Option B best captures this idea: deviation IQs are derived from standardized norms with designated means and standard deviations, which are similar across many commonly used IQ tests, allowing for more meaningful interpretation.

The other options do not describe the purpose of deviation IQs:

A. Lower the standard deviation among test takers – deviation IQs standardize the distribution; they don’t simply “lower” the standard deviation.

C. Place primary emphasis on selecting students in extreme intelligence categories – extremes can be identified, but that is not the primary reason deviation IQs were developed.

D. Reflect that all new IQ tests are being based on a common theory of intelligence – tests differ in their theoretical foundations; deviation scoring is a psychometric method, not a theory of intelligence.

Within the Intake, Assessment and Diagnosis area, counselors are expected to understand basic principles of standardized testing, including the interpretation of IQ scores using norm-referenced, deviation-based metrics.