Reviewing what you got wrong

Most candidates review by reading the correct answer and thinking "of course". That feeling is recognition, and recognition is the thing that betrayed you in the first place.

A review that works produces a list of causes rather than a list of facts. Here is how to build one.

Four causes, four fixes

Go through every wrong answer and write one of those four beside it. Nothing else. Not the topic, not the correct answer, just the cause.

Then count them. That distribution is the whole point of having sat the thing, and it usually contradicts what you assumed. A candidate whose misses are mostly "picked the wrong half" does not need more content and will get nothing from re-reading the manual. A candidate whose misses are mostly "ran out of clock" does not have a knowledge problem at all.

Both of those people would tell you they need to study harder. Both would be wrong, in opposite directions.

The second tally: which section, and which portion

Now tag each miss with its section from the content outline, and with whether it was general or Texas. Two tallies, three minutes, and they answer different questions.

The portion tally tells you which half is costing you. Missing general questions and missing Texas questions call for different weeks: one is a conceptual comparison problem across nine sections, the other is recall against a statute you can download. The section tally then tells you where inside that half to spend the time, weighted by what each section is worth.

Multiply your miss rate in a section by that section's published question count and you get questions at risk, which is the number that should drive your next fortnight. Accident and health policy types is worth 16 questions. Health maintenance organizations under Texas law is worth 3. Losing half of each is not the same event.

Redo them, but not today

Re-answering a question ten minutes after reading its explanation measures nothing except short-term memory, and you will get it right, and you will feel prepared.

Leave it a week. Then re-answer the ones you missed, cold, mixed in with new material so the context does not cue you. Whatever survives that is genuinely fixed. Whatever does not is the thing to work on, and it is usually a smaller list than you feared.

• Keep a single running list of missed items with the four-way cause code beside each
• Re-test at about a week, not immediately, and mix them into unfamiliar questions
• Re-code anything you miss twice. The cause often changes on the second pass, and that change is diagnostic
• Stop tracking a question once it has survived two cold re-tests

Reading a percentage you cannot compare to anything

There is no published pass mark for this exam. TDI sets the passing score and Pearson reports it as a scaled score rather than a percentage of questions, so a practice percentage has nothing official to be measured against.

We aim candidates at 78% on our own forms. That is our target and not a pass mark, set above where the evidence points so that a harder form still leaves room. The evidence itself: TDI publishes a mean scaled score of 69.75 with a standard deviation of 14.51 against a first-attempt pass rate of 57.7%, and a cut at a scaled 70 fits both figures. That inference is ours and we would rather label it than let it harden into a fact through repetition.

If you have already failed once

First, the context nobody gives you. 26,427 people sat this exam for the first time in fiscal year 2025 and 57.7% passed, which TDI publishes in a report almost nobody reads. Well over ten thousand people failed it that year. You are not an outlier and you did not discover a uniquely hard version.

Second, the thing to resist. The instinct after a fail is to start the whole syllabus again from section 1, and it is close to the worst available use of the time, because it re-teaches the material you already had and rations attention evenly across an exam that is not evenly weighted.

Do this instead. Sit a full form cold, before you study anything, and run the four-way classification over the result. It is unpleasant and it takes an afternoon. It also replaces guesswork with a list, and the list is nearly always shorter and stranger than the story you have been telling yourself about why you failed.

What we cannot see

Our review data covers our own questions. We can tell you which of our items are missed most and which distractors attract candidates, because we built the bank and we watch it, but we hold nothing about the live exam beyond what TDI and Pearson publish.

So treat the four-way classification as a method rather than as a finding. The method is sound wherever it is applied. The frequencies belong to your own paper, which is the only place they were ever going to be useful.