Practice and exam technique

How these questions are built, and where the pacing differs by an entire minute a question.

The free FTCE General Knowledge practice testThe free mock is 95 questions, weighted to the published counts: 30 English Language Skills, 30 Reading, 35 Mathematics. It returns three separate sco…
Using practice questions when there are four separate passes to clearSplit practice by subtest, not by total. Each of the three multiple-choice subtests passes on its own against its own cut, so a bank that returns one …
How an FTCE General Knowledge question is builtEach item is a stem with options, one of which is the key. Every item traces to a named skill in Section 82 of the competencies document, which Rule 6…
Six ways a wrong option is built in English Language SkillsWrong options in English Language Skills come from six repeatable places: the version that sounds right aloud, the over-correction, agreement with the…
Six ways a wrong option is built in the Reading subtestOn Reading, most wrong options are true. They are built as true-but-not-asked, wrong scope, outside knowledge, accurate-about-half-the-passage, word m…
Six ways a wrong option is built in MathematicsMathematics distractors are built from six errors: stopping one step short, inverting an operation, slipping a decimal place, dropping a sign, using t…
Pacing the three multiple-choice subtestsThree subtests, three clocks. English Language Skills gives 1.33 minutes a question, Reading 1.83 and Mathematics 2.86, on our arithmetic from FLDOE's…
Eighty seconds against a hundred and seventy: the widest gap on this testEnglish Language Skills allows about eighty seconds a question and Mathematics about a hundred and seventy-two. That is 1.33 minutes against 2.86, a s…
Reading a passage once and answering five questions from itReading items are grouped behind passages, several to a passage. Our bank deals five per passage: 60 passages, 300 items. Read the passage once with r…
The on-screen calculator, and what we can honestly tell you about itAn on-screen calculator is supplied during the Mathematics subtest, per FLDOE's Test Structure document. You do not bring your own. We have not seen t…
What the mathematics reference sheet covers, and why we will not guessA mathematics reference sheet is supplied during the Mathematics subtest, per FLDOE's Test Structure document. We cannot tell you what is on it. The s…
Working backwards from the options, and when it failsWorking backwards means testing the options in the stem instead of solving forward. It is fast on Mathematics items with a single unknown and useful o…
When to guess, and why a blank is always the worse choiceAnswer everything. Nothing in Rule 6A-4.0021 or FLDOE's Test Structure document describes a deduction for a wrong answer, and the passing standard is …
A worked English Language Skills questionTwo worked items, both written by us. The first turns on subject-verb agreement across a prepositional phrase; the second on choosing precisely among …
A worked Reading questionOne passage, two questions, both ours. The first is a main-idea item where three of the four options are true statements about the passage. The second…
A worked Mathematics questionThree worked items, all ours. Each one shows where its wrong options come from: stopping a step short, using the neighboring formula, and slipping a d…