When a principal preparation program tells you it has an 85 percent pass rate on the 268, it is almost certainly not telling you how many of its candidates passed on the first try. It is telling you how many passed eventually, counting every retake.
Those are two different numbers, and TEA publishes them both. For the 2024-25 program year, 61 percent of Texas candidates passed the Principal as Instructional Leader exam on the first attempt. Sixty-nine percent got there across all attempts.
If you are about to sit for this exam, the first number is the one that describes your Saturday.
Two numbers, one exam
TEA's pass rate report breaks every certification exam out by "first attempt" and "best attempt". Best attempt counts a candidate as a pass no matter how many times they sat for it. First attempt counts only the first time.
Here is the 268, statewide, straight from that report. First attempt, then best attempt, for every program year it covers:
- 2020-21. 72 percent first attempt, 84 percent best. 2,866 candidates.
- 2021-22. 65 percent first attempt, 81 percent best. 2,215 candidates.
- 2022-23. 64 percent first attempt, 80 percent best. 2,312 candidates.
- 2023-24. 60 percent first attempt, 77 percent best. 2,053 candidates.
- 2024-25. 61 percent first attempt, 69 percent best. 2,233 candidates.
Read the first-attempt figures top to bottom. They have fallen 11 points in four years, on a population that has stayed close to the same size. Roughly four in ten Texas principal candidates fail the 268 the first time they take it.
Nobody advertises that column. There is no reason to. A program that eventually gets 80 percent of its people certified has a true and flattering sentence available to it, and it uses that one.
Why the gap is not a knowledge gap
The distance between 61 and 69 is made of people who took the exam again and passed it the second or third time. Ask what changed between attempts.
Almost none of them went back and learned school finance. They did not discover a domain they had skipped. In most cases they knew the same material on both days. What changed was how they read the questions.
That is the uncomfortable part. If a retake works without new content, the first failure was not really about content.
I have watched this pattern for years across certification exams, and the 268 produces a particularly sharp version of it, because of who takes it. This is an exam for people who already work in schools. Assistant principals, deans, instructional coaches, teacher leaders. They walk in with a decade of judgment about what to do when a teacher is struggling or a parent is angry.
Then they meet a question where all four options are things a competent principal would do, and the exam wants to know which one comes first.
Experience is the trap
A test writer builds a 268 item around a framework. A campus leader answers it out of memory. Those two things line up most of the time, and when they do not, experience loses.
Christie Ray, who builds this course with me and led a campus as a Principal of the Year, puts it plainly: the exam is not asking what worked at your school. It is asking what the framework says a principal does first. Both answers can be defensible. Only one is scored.
That is why the retake works. Between attempt one and attempt two, a candidate stops answering as a practitioner and starts answering as a reader of the question. Nothing else had to change.
The waste is that the lesson costs a fee, a testing window, and a semester of delay to learn.
What the retake actually costs
A first-attempt failure is not one bad Saturday. It is:
- another registration fee,
- another testing window, which in practice means another month or more,
- a certification date that slips past the spring hiring season,
- and for some candidates, the end of the road. They do not come back at all.
That last group rarely shows up in anybody's statistics. A program counts the candidates who returned and passed. The ones who quietly stopped are not in the numerator or the denominator of the number it advertises.
What to do with this
Two things, whether you are a candidate or you run a program.
If you are sitting for the 268: stop asking whether you know the six domains, and start asking whether you can tell a good answer from the best one. Study the question format with the same seriousness you give the content. Our free trial opens with exactly that, because it is where the points actually move.
If you run a preparation program: ask for your own two numbers rather than your headline one. TEA has them broken out by program in the same report. Most directors I speak with have never seen their first-attempt and best-attempt rates side by side, and the spread between them is usually a surprise.
You can pull the report yourself from TEA's educator data page. Find your program, find the 268 row, and read across.
The number in the first column is the one your candidates live in.
Statewide figures above are from the Texas Education Agency's Texas Educator Certification Examination Program pass rate report, broken out by subtest and educator preparation program, first and best attempt, covering September 2020 through August 2025.