CTSO Or CTE—Both Have Tests

Aaahhhhh, March. The month that my seniors take their End of Program tests and my FBLA kids take their State Conference tests. To heck with the ACTs—these are the important ones!!! For my seniors, passing means 12 college credits. For FBLA, success means a ticket to Nationals. So, basically, test prep is important.

These are the true high stakes tests.

The common thread here is preparation. I need to do everything I can to ensure that my students are successful in these examinations. 

What Are The Differences?

Not much

When you get right down to it, there aren’t that many differences between CTE and CTSO testing. Both of them are proctored and high-stakes. Both of them are culminations of significant time spent learning a particular subject matter. Test prep is treated similarly. Both of them give us as educators an idea of how well we conveyed knowledge—and if there are any “holes” in what we offered our students.

Time is one hour or so

Both tests are timed for almost all students, with the average being about an hour. These are not like sitting for the CPA exam or the Bar—they are fast and furious and downright dirty in some instances.

Between 50 and 100 questions

Both types of tests boil down a year or more of study into a short 50 to 100 test questions. It’s always a guessing game what standards they will focus on and which they will skip entirely, so we plan and prepare and just plain hope we studied the right things.

Standards are always available in advance

Here is the piece that many students—and some educators—miss completely: The standards are already there for you to review. There really shouldn’t be any big surprises on these tests, as long as you look over the standards and design your study plan for them. 

The Basis For Objective Tests

Vocabulary – nothing better

I tell kids all the time, in every class, that it’s all about the vocabulary. We are in the business administration field—it has a language all its own, and the more comfortable students become with that lexicon, the better they will do on any objective test. But memorizing vocabulary won’t cut it—they need to be able to apply those words to situations and topics for them to fully recognize what the question is asking them on the test.

Common topics

I’ve been doing this a long, long time. I’ve had kids take chapter and unit and mid-term and final exams and standardized tests for decades. The tests and test prep starts to run together in my mind, because they have common threads as the years go by. I guarantee journal entries distributing income to owners equity will be on your Accounting test, Boo Boo, it always is. 

Scenarios for applied thinking

The most difficult questions your students will face are those that require them to apply knowledge to situations or scenarios. This is why memorizing vocabulary is insufficient for studying for CTE or CTSO tests. Despite being multiple choice, there will be intricate and advanced scenarios that students will need to work through to find the correct answer. Definitely “DOK 4” stuff, if you use Depth of Knowledge in your school. 

Preparation For Any CTE Or CTSO Test

Work with a partner or a team

As a general statement, students are social creatures, so capitalizing on that to improve their study skills is important. Yes, I’ve got a few kids who prefer to go it alone, but most of my students prefer to share the work—and the responsibility—with a peer. I’ve also found that, when working with other students, kids are more likely to get their own work done, so they don’t let the group down. 

Create a schedule at least a month out

The worst thing you can do to your students is to not build in time to prepare for the upcoming tests. While most students are not very forward-thinking and proactive about building a study plan, it is our responsibility to not only put it on their radar, but to put it in our plans for class or club meetings. I use the daily warm-up in class as a consistent way to introduce vocabulary or topics they need to be familiar with, and our icebreakers in FBLA are generally centered on improving skills needed for competition.

Create a collaborative, friendly team

While we are absolutely talking about high-stakes testing, it’s important that we keep the class and club environment as relaxed as possible. Building stress will not serve your cause, and certainly will not help your students become well-prepared for the impending test. 

Sources For Studying

Use your CTE standards

How familiar are you with your standards? I’m betting you are very familiar with most of them, but I’ll bet there are a few that you sort of skim and gloss over in an effort to make your lessons interesting and enjoyable for students. Yeah…me too. But when it comes to CTE and CTSO testing, now is the time for us to dust them off—all of them—and make students as familiar as possible with them

Print the standards for students – It was a lot of pages, and a ton of photocopying, but I recently printed and copied our entire standards for a class of students. They have had inadequate teaching due to a long-term substitute situation, and they were terrified about their End of Program test. It’s worth 12 college credits—they had a right to be concerned. It isn’t the best way to expose our students to the standards, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to give them a copy to study from.

Use the standards for different courses that are offered – through the years, we have learned that there is absolutely some crossover in CTE and CTSO testing. While I don’t think this is particularly fair to subject students to other disciplines in a testing environment, I understand that sometimes vocabulary and topics transcends just one test. Because of this potentiality, we will expose our students to the most common standards from other classes and disciplines, just so they have some understanding of basic vocabulary.

Use existing resources

I’m a huge fan of NOT reinventing the wheel. However, I have learned the hard way that some of the “wheels” we have borrowed haven’t had any tread at all. Some of them were completely worthless, bordering on negatively impacting our students. So, by all means capitalize on someone else’s work that has been made public, but make sure you are double-checking those test prep sources!

Quizlet and other free test sites – All of those participatory websites make me a bit nervous, because you don’t really know the intelligence or knowledge level of the person who made the test. That being said, I direct kids to these sites all the time as their first stop to become familiar with basic vocabulary. These sites are perfect for casual use—I wouldn’t rely on them for intense test preparation, but would absolutely use them for review purposes.

CTSO homepages will have references – Have you done a deep-dive on the CTSO national homepage? Not only are there incredible resources on the competitive event pages, but most of the sites now have discussion boards where like-minded advisors can get suggestions and help from other professionals. These homepages have become significantly more valuable and useful through the years, and I recommend spending some time digging through their resources.

Use the Real World

Business is nothing if not “Real World”. Sometimes, I fear that we get so locked into the textbook that we don’t expose our students to things that are actually happening around the country and the world. That needs to change.

Have students read current events – they show up in CTSO tests – Over the years, I have seen many different current event topics show up in competitive events. Not only the objective tests, but some of the role playing events often come from actual situations in our environment. Further, reading current events online will expose your students to application of some of the vocabulary they are studying. By building that vocabulary into a deeper understanding, students will be better prepared for the online tests and role play events.

Have students keep individual vocab lists to share with the team – One of the things we have students do is keep a running vocabulary list. These are not just words they found challenging from our lists, but these are words or topics they have found through current events and discussions with other people. We have them share this list, so that it informs our entire group. 

No Matter What

Don’t wait until the last minute – cramming won’t work

It is incumbent on you, as the teaching professional, to build a study plan that students can follow to help them be successful on the CTE and CTSO tests. They are accustomed to “cramming” the night before an Algebra or History test, but that just won’t work as test prep on the high stakes testing environments we are talking about. Their understanding of the subject matter needs to be deeply ingrained in their brains—cramming won’t do that.

Ergonomics

Oh, yeah, don’t forget to teach them about ergonomics. Seriously. My kids who just took their CTE Business Management End of Program test told me there were four—four out of fifty—questions about ergonomics. I never covered ergonomics. Aside from telling typing students in the 1990’s to “sit up straight”, I’ve never touched ergonomics in any of my classes. But I looked, and it’s in my standards. It’s a footnote for test prep, but it’s there.

My point is this: You can’t cover absolutely everything. You just can’t.

But if they are as prepared as they can be and know you believe in them, common sense and good test-taking strategies will carry them through.

After all, we had a 100% pass rate on that CTE test. Ergonomics and all.  

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