TExES tech

Well, the exams (TExES Generalist EC-4 and TExES PPR EC-4) are taken and the results will be available in July! Got up at 6:00 a.m., the first test started at 8:00, I was finished before 11:00, I went home for lunch, came back for the second exam which started at 2:00 p.m., and I was finished with that one by 4:00.

I think I did well enough. The TExES is scored, I believe, on a scale of 100–300, with a score of 240 considered passing. Unless they're doing something iffy with the scoring system (as so many standardized tests do), I'm figuring that getting 70% of the questions right is passing.

I can't imagine that I did worse than that, although more questions than I expected --- perhaps up to twenty percent of the two hundred total --- gave me pause. I'd narrow it down to two choices, but be unsure as to which was best in the minds of the Competencies and Standards pencil-pushers. (On a couple of the questions that related to pre-K classroom management, one choice would be very close to what I would actually do at The Job, and the other choice would be what I suspected the test wanted me to do.)

I was expecting a bit more testing of actual knowledge and content on the Generalist exam, but there wasn't much. As far as I can recall, there was no knowledge of authors or science needed. One question required that you know that cheap land, not oil (discovered only at the turn of the century) was the primary draw for settlers in 19th-century Texas. One question required that you know the definition of obtuse and acute angles.

In the past, I've almost never gone back to "check my work" on standardized tests --- no patience for that sort of thing, too low an attention span, great and possibly misplaced faith in my own first instincts. This time, however, I did re-read both tests and changed quite a few answers. For some questions, I thought I chosen the wrong thing, and for at least two questions, I found to me amazement that I had circled one answer on the test booklet but filled in the wrong oval on the answer sheet. So I suppose it's good that I went back to check, but I'm still suspicious of second-guessing myself.

On the whole, I feel reasonably good about the whole experience. I'm a very educated guy, and the test is geared toward people with far less education, so nothing on the test troubled me too much. But I'm not a good judge of how well I do on these standardized things (I'm usually pleasantly surprised, but you never can tell). I now have simply to put the whole thing out of my mind until the scores are available.