What a good practice question looks like

You can judge a question bank from four questions. Here's what to look at.

Test one: does it map to a stated skill?

The syllabus for this examination is Section 82 of Competencies and Skills Required for Teacher Certification in Florida, Twenty-Eighth Edition, and Rule 6A-4.0021 incorporates it by reference. Ten competencies and 57 skills across the three multiple-choice subtests. That's a closed list.

So every item should be traceable to one of them. A question that tests something real but unlisted is a question you'll spend time on and never be asked. Ask a provider to name the skill behind an item and watch what happens.

Test two: does every wrong option mean something?

This is the test almost all free practice fails. In a good item each distractor is the answer you'd reach by making one specific, nameable mistake. In a bad one, three options are obviously wrong and the item tests whether you're awake.

Compare that with a weak version of the same skill: "The essays was reviewed." Nobody who can read gets that wrong, so it measures nothing and it teaches nothing. Distance between the subject and the verb is the whole point of the skill.

Test three: does it fit the clock?

Counts and minutes are FLDOE's, from the Test Structure document. The last column is ours, and it's the sanity check. An English Language Skills item with a hundred-word stem doesn't belong in a subtest that gives you 1.33 minutes a question, however good the grammar point is.

Mathematics runs at more than twice that, which tells you something about what its items are allowed to be: multi-step, and worth the time.

Test four: is the Reading item answerable without the passage?

Cover the text and try. If you can still pick the right answer from general knowledge or from the shape of the options, the item isn't testing reading. All 30 Reading questions on the real test sit under text selections, and the competencies say so in their own titles.

This is where padded banks give themselves away. Passages are expensive to write and standalone questions are cheap, so a bank under commercial pressure grows in the direction of items that don't need one.

The explanation is half the item

A wrong answer is only useful if it tells you where to go next. Because the competencies are part of a state rule, an explanation for this examination can point at quotable text rather than at a publisher's summary, and there's no excuse for one that doesn't.

What we'd want to see: the correct answer, the skill it comes from, and one line per distractor naming the mistake. All four of ours do that. It's also why 950 questions took as long to build as they did, and the concession that goes with it is that a smaller bank of well-written items beats a larger one, so question count is a poor thing to shop on.

One thing no practice question can do

Test the essay. That's one written response in 50 minutes, scored by at least two qualified raters whose scores sum to a passing total of 6, and no multiple-choice item touches it. A bank that gives you a confident score is describing three subtests out of four.