One minute nine seconds a question, and why that average is a lie

Two numbers are published. One hundred and thirty scored questions, and 150 minutes to answer them. Divide, and you get 1.15 minutes a question, which in the units your body actually understands is one minute and nine seconds.

Nobody prints that. It is a division we did, and every page on this site that uses it says so.

Why an average is the wrong number here

An average is useful when the things being averaged are alike. These are not.

The 30 Texas questions ask about statute. What must an agent do within a stated period, which body has a stated power, what a policy issued in Texas is required to contain. Those are recall questions, and recall is fast or it is absent. If you know that the Commissioner holds that authority, the question is over in twenty seconds. If you do not, another forty seconds will not conjure it out of the air.

The 100 general questions are a different animal. Most of them present facts and ask you which of four concepts those facts engage, and two of the four options are usually the two halves of a pair candidates routinely fuse. That is a comparison, not a lookup, and comparisons take time.

So the flat average is describing a paper nobody sits.

The trade, in numbers

Here is the arithmetic that follows, and it is ours as well. Run the 30 Texas questions at forty seconds each and they consume 20 minutes. That leaves 130 minutes for the 100 general questions, which is seventy-eight seconds apiece.

Nine seconds. That is what the trade is worth per general question, and it does not sound like anything until you notice it compounds across a hundred items into most of a quarter of an hour of thinking time you would not otherwise have had.

Not every general question deserves seventy-eight seconds either

The general portion is nine sections and they are not weighted equally. Accident and health policy types is the heaviest at 16 questions. Other insurance concepts is the lightest at 5.

The question counts in that table are Pearson's own. The last column is ours, and it is a judgment about the kind of work a section demands rather than anything the outline states.

Read down it and the shape of your exam day appears. Social insurance is 6 questions on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits, and those are facts you either hold or do not, so they should run at Texas speed. That is another four minutes of reserve nobody counts.

What this changes about how you study

It changes what "knowing" the Texas material has to mean. Recognizing a provision when you see it is not enough, because recognition at exam speed is what makes the whole trade work. You want the Texas material at the level where the answer arrives before you have finished reading the options.

That is a memorization job and it is a small one. Thirty questions, four sections, and a body of statute you can cover properly in a fortnight of evenings. It is also the half most candidates leave until last, which is exactly backwards, because it is the half that pays for the other one.

Our opinion: the 30 Texas questions are the best return on study time anywhere in this exam, and treating them as the small annoying bit at the end costs people the general portion. How to split time between the two halves is a separate argument, but the timing is a large part of it.

Where this reasoning is soft

Two places, and both are worth naming.

The forty seconds is an assumption. A statute question with a long fact pattern in front of it takes longer to read than one asking directly which body issues a license, and we have no data on how the Texas items are actually worded on the live form. The second softness is bigger: the paper administers 145 items, not 130, so every figure above is generous by the width of the 15 pretest questions you cannot identify. Treat the table as the shape of the trade rather than a stopwatch reading.