ICTS Test

The Illinois Certification Testing System (ICTS) is mandatory for educators, school staff and administrators as part of the certification process.

There are several types of ICTS tests, but all are criterion-referenced and objective-based. The ICTS test types are as follows:

• Basic skills - This assessment includes 125 multiple-choice items and one written answer. It measures a candidate's ability in reading comprehension, language arts, math and writing.
• Assessment of Professional Teaching (APT) - These assessments measure a candidate's educational and expert knowledge and ability. There are 120 multiple-choice items and two written answers. These tests are given for the four levels, including birth to third grade, kindergarten through ninth grade, sixth grade through twelfth grade, or kindergarten through twelfth grade.
• Content-area - These assessments have 125 multiple-choice items. The only exceptions are the special-education general curriculum assessment (which has 65 multiple-choice items) and the foreign language content area assessments.
• Foreign language content area - There are 100 multiple-choice items and two written answers for the assessments on French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Russian and Spanish. There are seven written answer topics (without any multiple choice) on the assessments for Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese and Korean.
• Learning behavior specialist II (LBSII) - Each assessment has six written answer topics, three of which are on their own and three of which have to do with one given case study.
• Language proficiency test for the transitional bilingual certificate - There are two tests that fall in this category, including the English language proficiency (ELP) assessment and the target language proficiency (TLP) - Spanish assessment. Both have 55 multiple-choice items and two written answer topics. If you are taking a TLP assessment for anything other than Spanish, it will have four written answers to do.

A candidate's ICTS test raw score will be converted to a scaled score in the 100-300 range. Not every question on your test will be included in your score, since some items are pre-trial questions that will be used on future exams. The minimum passing scaled score is 240. On the basic skills test, the minimum passing score is 240, and candidates must also get half of the reading, language and math questions correct and at least 5 out of 12 for the writing score.