Teaching on a Temporary Certificate

You're teaching. The General Knowledge Test is still sitting on your outstanding list, and now you have to clear it around a job that already takes your evenings. This page is about that specific problem rather than about the certificate itself.

What the Temporary Certificate is, in the sourced version

Florida issues a Temporary Certificate which allows a person to teach while completing outstanding requirements. What counts as outstanding, and for how long you have, is set by rule and by the district. That is the whole of what we hold on it, and it is deliberately less than you probably want.

The fee schedule has no bulk discount, and that changes your plan

Here is the arithmetic nobody points out. The registration fee schedule in Rule 6A-4.0021(4)(b) prices a single subtest at USD 32.50, two at USD 65, three at USD 97.50 and the full battery at USD 130. Four times 32.50 is 130. There is no discount for taking them together.

So a teacher who takes one subtest a month for four months pays exactly what a candidate who sits everything on a Saturday pays. The only thing you give up is the trip to the test center, and you get back the ability to prepare for one subtest at a time. If you are teaching full time, that is a straightforward trade and most people take it without knowing it is free.

Sitting all four together is 245 minutes plus a scheduled 15-minute break. That is a long afternoon on top of a teaching week.

Sit the essay first

This is our recommendation and the reason is entirely about calendar rather than difficulty. The three multiple-choice subtests are scored at the test center before you leave, so a fail is known immediately and the 30-day retake clock starts that day. The essay is rated by two people at scoring sessions and takes about four weeks.

That means an essay failure is invisible for a month. If it is the last thing you sit, it can push your completion past a deadline you cannot move. Sat first, the four-week wait runs in parallel with your preparation for everything else, and it costs you nothing.

The published 2025 first-attempt pass rate for the essay is 64%, the lowest of the four subtests. Reading is 78%, Mathematics 71%, English Language Skills 68%. So the subtest with the slowest result is also the one most likely to need a second go, which is an unhelpful combination and worth planning around rather than hoping about.

Check whether you need to sit anything at all

Before you plan four appointments, spend twenty minutes on your old score reports. Rule 6A-4.0021(12) accepts qualifying GRE, SAT, ACT and CLT scores against the general knowledge requirement subtest by subtest, and one SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score of 560 covers three of the four. The dates matter: GRE from 1 July 2015, and SAT, ACT and CLT from 1 March 2016. Every accepted score is listed on our page about the alternative routes to the general knowledge requirement.

Shortening your outstanding list is worth more than any study plan we could sell you, and it costs nothing.

What the wait actually looks like if you fail one

More than a third of candidates retake something, so budget a retake into your calendar rather than treating it as a failure state. The compound arithmetic across all four subtests is ours and it puts roughly a quarter of candidates clearing the whole set at the first attempt, with the working shown on the page about the first-attempt rate.

Two things we cannot help you with

The first is the certificate itself. We hold the department's examination documents, not its certification rules, so questions about eligibility, duration and conversion to a Professional Certificate belong with the department rather than with us.

The second is money. We hold no salary data for Florida teachers, so we cannot tell you what clearing your outstanding requirements is worth in pay terms, and we are not going to guess. If your district ties pay to certificate status, its published salary schedule is the document that answers it.