What TDI publishes every year that nobody reads

There is a public document that settles most of the arguments on the internet about how hard the Texas insurance exams are. It is filed with the Governor. It is prepared by the company that actually administers the tests. It is free. And in a morning of reading Texas insurance prep pages, we did not find one that quoted it.

What the report is

The agent and adjuster examination demographic report is a statutory filing, not a marketing document. Pearson VUE compiles it because Pearson VUE runs the examinations under contract, which means the counts come from the appointment system rather than from a survey. That is about as close to a census as examination data gets.

What is in it

For each examination, the number of first-time candidates and the share of them who passed. Mean scaled score. Standard deviation of scaled scores. Tables run from table 2 through table 160, one examination or one breakdown at a time.

Five numbers. Between them they answer how many people sit this examination, how many clear it, how a typical candidate scores, and how widely candidates differ from each other. That last one is the figure nobody uses and it is arguably the most informative of the five.

Why it goes uncited

Three guesses, and we will label them as guesses. It is a PDF of statutory tables with a dull name, so it does not surface for a search like "texas insurance exam pass rate". It is filed annually rather than published as a web page, so there is no obvious URL to link. And the people writing about this examination are mostly selling preparation for it, and a 57.7% first-time pass rate on an examination with no pre-licensing requirement is not the most helpful figure for that pitch.

The third one is a genuine conflict of interest and we are not exempt from it. We sell a course too. The difference we can defend is that the number is on the page.

The best thing in it is the comparison nobody makes

Because every Texas insurance examination is in the same report on the same definitions, you can line them up. Doing that produces the single most interesting fact about insurance licensing in Texas, and it has nothing to do with how hard the papers are.

Same regulator. Same year. Same report. 26,427 people sat one examination and 403 sat the other, a gap of more than sixty to one, and Texas has no shortage of adjusters. The reason is in Pearson's own candidate handbook rather than in the papers: an adjuster is exempt from the examination by completing a 40-hour TDI-approved course, and a General Lines agent is exempt only by holding the Chartered Life Underwriter designation. One of those exemptions is a product sold for $150 to $400. The other is eight college-level courses.

So the adjuster examination is not unpopular. It is optional. This examination is not popular either; it is compulsory, and the difference between 403 and 26,427 is a policy choice rather than a measure of demand for the two careers.

That reading is ours. TDI publishes the counts and the handbook publishes the exemptions, and joining them is our inference. We think it is a safe one. We would not want it quoted as the Department's view.

What we could not get out of it

• No preparation data. Nothing about courses, hours, or materials, so no vendor claim can be tested against it
• No portion-level scores. The 100 general questions and the 30 Texas ones are scored as one result and reported as one result
• No path from first attempt to eventual license. The report gives you first-time candidates. It does not follow a person from a failed attempt through a retake to a license, which is the number a candidate who has just failed actually wants

We hold the report on disk along with the Texas Insurance Code, the candidate handbook and the content outline. We do not hold Title 28 of the Texas Administrative Code, which the outline cites throughout the state portion. It is public and harvestable and we simply have not done it, which is worth saying out loud on a page about reading the source material.