NCE-ABE Exam Dumps - National Counselor Examination

This question draws on both Social and Cultural Diversity and Counseling and Helping Relationships core areas. Counselors are expected to:

Demonstrate cultural sensitivity and responsiveness with clients from marginalized groups, including transgender clients.

Respond to potential bias, discrimination, or microaggressions in ways that prioritize the client’s safety, dignity, and emotional experience.

Use empathic, client-centered responses to explore feelings before problem-solving or taking action.

Option analysis:

A. “I’ll help you file a complaint…” – Advocacy and support may be appropriate later, but jumping straight to action skips the crucial step of understanding the client’s internal experience.

B. “What feelings came up for you when your advisor told you that?” – This response is client-centered and explores the student’s emotional reaction to a potentially discriminatory event. It aligns with core counseling skills and multicultural competence, making it the best initial response.

C. “How do you think that being transgender would negatively impact your career choice?” – This subtly assumes that being transgender is a negative factor and risks reinforcing stigma, which is contrary to multicultural and ethical principles.

D. “You need to do what is best for you regardless of what your advisor says.” – This is advice-giving and bypasses exploration of feelings, context, and potential systemic issues.

Because the first task in a counseling relationship—especially around identity and discrimination—is to understand and validate the client’s emotional experience, Option B is the most appropriate initial response.

In the Social and Cultural Diversity core area, counselors are expected to demonstrate multicultural competence, including the ability to broach topics such as race, ethnicity, culture, oppression, identity, and power dynamics.

Broaching is the counselor’s intentional effort to:

Acknowledge and invite discussion of cultural and sociopolitical factors affecting the client,

Normalize and validate the significance of the client’s cultural identities, and

Address how these factors may shape the counseling relationship and presenting concerns.

Best practice is for broaching to occur early and repeatedly:

It should be introduced in the first session to set a foundation that cultural and identity-related issues are welcome topics.

It should continue throughout the counseling process, as relevance may change or deepen over time.

Limiting broaching to referral considerations (A) or only when a client formally requests it (B) contradicts multicultural counseling competencies, which emphasize counselor responsibility.

Doing it only by the second session and at termination (C) makes it infrequent and procedural, rather than an ongoing part of the relationship.

Thus, broaching is implemented in the first session and throughout counseling, making D the correct answer.

The Counseling and Helping Relationships core area includes person-centered (client-centered) theory, originating with Carl Rogers. A central concept in this approach is unconditional positive regard—warm acceptance, respect, and valuing of the person without conditions of worth.

Applied to the parent–child relationship, a client-centered perspective emphasizes that:

Children should experience consistent acceptance and respect,

Love and regard are not contingent on performance, behavior, or meeting parental conditions,

This environment supports healthy self-concept and growth.

Thus, Option C (unconditional positive regard) directly reflects the client-centered approach.

The other options come from different theoretical frameworks:

A. Authoritarianism conflicts with client-centered values and reflects a rigid, controlling style.

B. Natural and logical consequences are features of Adlerian / Dreikursian parenting approaches.

D. Behavior-shaping is rooted in behavioral/operant conditioning, not client-centered theory.

Therefore, C is the correct answer.

Within the Assessment and Testing core area, counselors are expected to understand measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and how they relate to the shape of a distribution. When the mode is higher than the mean (mode = 115, mean = 110), this suggests a negatively skewed distribution, meaning that:

There are some relatively low scores pulling the mean downward.

The most frequent score (mode) is higher than the average score.

From this pattern, it is reasonable to infer that a few very low scores are present, which is reflected in option A.

Option B (“most students scored below the mean”) is not necessarily true; in skewed distributions, many scores may actually be above the mean.

Option C (calculation error) is not supported by the information; mean and mode do not have to be equal.

Option D (high reliability) cannot be inferred from central tendency measures; reliability relates to consistency of measurement (e.g., test–retest, internal consistency), not mean vs. mode relationships.

Thus, the best conclusion consistent with assessment principles is A. A few students showed very low intelligence scores.