How to split your time between general and Texas

This is the decision that changes the most about how you prepare, and most people get it wrong in the same direction. They over-study Texas statute because it feels like the hard part. It is 30 of 130 questions.

Why statute pulls attention it does not deserve

Three reasons, and none of them is about marks. It has Texas in the name, so it feels like the part that is specific to this license. It is statute, so it feels legally consequential in a way that policy riders do not. And it is unfamiliar to everybody, including people who have worked in insurance for a decade, so it is the part that produces the most anxiety in the most candidates.

Anxiety is a terrible allocator. The published counts are a good one, and they say the Texas portion is under a quarter of your result.

The general portion, hour by section

One hour per three questions is the rate we would use. It is enough to read a section, work questions on it, and come back to it once. These are Pearson's published counts, not our estimates.

Read that table top down and something jumps out. The four biggest sections are policy types and policy provisions for both lines, and between them they carry more than half the general portion. Everything else on the general side is a supporting act.

The Texas portion, hour by section

Section 10 carries nearly half of the Texas portion on its own. Licensing, appointment, unfair trade practices, replacement, the Guaranty Association: the material that applies to both lines is where the Texas marks are, and the line-specific sections are much smaller than their headings suggest.

Section 13 is 3 questions. It is the smallest thing on the paper. Candidates give it a weekend because health maintenance organizations sound like a distinct legal universe, and it is one hour.

When to break the ratio

Three cases, and only three.

• You already work in insurance. The general portion is largely your working vocabulary and the Texas portion is not. Move toward parity on a smaller total, because your advantage is entirely on one side
• A split diagnostic says Texas is genuinely weak. Move hours across, but stop at a third of your total. Past a third you are buying 30 questions with hours that belong to 100
• You have already been through the general material once. A second pass costs less than a first, so the ratio narrows naturally as you get closer to the date

What is not a reason: statute feeling harder. It is harder per question, we agree, and per question is not the unit you are scored in.

The uplift we would allow

A strict allocation by marks would put under a quarter of your hours on Texas. We say a quarter, and that small uplift is deliberate: statute answers cannot be reasoned out, so an unlearned statute question is a lost mark rather than a fifty-fifty guess, and there is no partial credit for understanding the general shape of a rule.

That is as far as it goes. A candidate spending half their preparation on Texas statute has doubled the attention on under a quarter of the paper, and it is the most common self-inflicted wound on this examination.

Where our own bias sits

Worth naming, since this page tells you to spend less time on the thing we are best at. We hold 47 chapters of the Texas Insurance Code, so our Texas answers cite the section the answer turns on. The general questions are explained by reasoning instead, because general insurance principles are not in a statute book.

So our strongest material covers the smaller portion. We would still tell you to spend three quarters of your time on the general side, because that is where 100 of the 130 marks are, and a page that told you otherwise would be selling rather than advising.