Question banks, and the four things that separate a good one

A question bank is the cheapest useful thing you can buy for this test and the easiest to get wrong. Count of questions is the number every provider leads with. It's close to meaningless on its own.

Check one: does it have passages?

The Reading subtest is 30 questions in 55 minutes, and every one of them sits under a text selection. The competencies say so in their own titles: knowledge of key ideas and details based on text selections, craft and structure based on text selections, integration of information and ideas based on text selections.

Writing a passage is real work. Writing a standalone question is not. So the fastest way to spot a padded bank is to open the Reading section and see whether the questions come attached to anything. If they're free-floating grammar or vocabulary items filed under Reading, the bank does not test the subtest and its Reading score means nothing.

Ours holds 60 reading passages against 950 questions. That ratio is the number we'd want a competitor to publish, and almost none of them do.

Check two: is it weighted the way the test is?

Questions and minutes are FLDOE's, from the Test Structure document effective 1 January 2026. The last column is ours, and it's just division. It's also the single most useful thing on this page, because English Language Skills gives you less than half the time per question that Mathematics does and nobody warns you.

A bank weighted to what's easy to write drifts toward Mathematics, because math items are quick to produce and objectively markable. Check the counts against the table above.

Check three: full-length timed forms

Practicing 10 questions at a time teaches you the content and tells you nothing about whether you'll finish. English Language Skills at 1.33 minutes a question is the subtest where people run out of clock, and you find that out by sitting 30 questions in 40 minutes, not by drilling.

So ask how many distinct full forms exist. One form is a demo. A bank with several lets you retest without memorizing the answers, which matters if you're in a 30-day retake wait with nothing else to do. We ship 5 forms of 95 questions.

Check four: do the explanations name the source?

This test has an unusual advantage over most. The syllabus 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, so the competency behind a question is quotable text from a state rule rather than a publisher's guess at scope.

An explanation that says "the correct answer is B because B is correct" is filler. One that names the competency turns a wrong answer into a place to go and read. Every explanation we write cites the competency it comes from, and that's less a feature than the minimum this particular examination allows.

What we don't know about the competition

We haven't bought and audited a rival bank, and we're not going to print a price or a question count for one that we haven't verified. What we can say is what the market looks like: banks sell either as a monthly subscription or as fixed-period access, free samples are usually a dozen questions or so, and almost nobody publishes a passage count. Ask for one.

Ours is USD 79 for 12 months: 950 questions, 60 reading passages, 78 lesson blocks, 124 learn checks and 5 mock forms of 95 questions, refundable in full for 7 days while you've used no more than a fifth of it. The concession that goes with that: 950 is comfortably more than most candidates work through, and if you only need to shore up one subtest you're buying four and using one.