2.3 Pretest Items and Exam Development

Pretest items are invisible during the exam

Both EPPP parts include pretest items. Pretest items are not scored and are used for future exam development. They appear among the visible items, and candidates should not expect the exam to label them. That is why the only sound testing behavior is to answer every item with full effort.

Part 1-Knowledge includes 225 total items: 175 scored and 50 pretest. Part 2-Skills includes 170 total items: 130 scored and 40 pretest. Those numbers should be memorized as complete pairs. Saying only the total without the scored and pretest breakdown can lead to bad pacing assumptions and bad score interpretation.

Pretest items can feel no different from scored items. A familiar-looking item may be pretest, and a challenging item may be scored. A candidate who tries to guess which items count is wasting cognitive energy. Worse, that guessing can create careless errors on items that do count.

Pretest design also explains why post-exam memory is unreliable. Candidates tend to remember the hardest, strangest, or most emotionally charged items. Some of those remembered items may not have contributed to the score. Others may have contributed, but the candidate's memory may be incomplete. Use official score information and broad domain review rather than trying to reconstruct the form from memory.

For pacing, pretest items matter because they still consume time. Part 1 requires work across 225 visible items even though 175 are scored. Part 2 requires work across 170 visible items even though 130 are scored. Your timer does not pause when an item is pretest. The practical plan is to pace by total visible items, not by scored items only.

For studying, pretest items mean you should avoid narrow item-chasing. The exam program is built to maintain and develop future forms. The candidate's preparation should focus on durable competence: concepts, decision rules, ethics, assessment logic, intervention planning, research interpretation, cultural responsiveness, and professional judgment. That competence transfers across scored and pretest items.

A useful mental script is: I cannot know whether this item is scored, so I will answer it as well as I can and move on. This script prevents both overinvestment and underinvestment. Overinvestment happens when one hard item consumes too much time. Underinvestment happens when a candidate dismisses an unusual item as probably not scored.

Pretest items are not a trick to fear. They are a standard exam-development practice. The candidate's job is much simpler: know the complete counts, pace by total visible items, answer everything, and interpret the score through ASPPB's scaled-score reporting rather than through remembered item fragments.