GACE Elementary Education Pass Rate 2026

There is no official GACE Elementary Education pass rate. The Georgia Professional Standards Commission (GaPSC) sets the passing standard and Evaluation Systems, Pearson administers the assessment, and neither publishes how many candidates pass — not on the program's test pages, not on its score-reporting pages, and not on the GaPSC assessment pages. There is a second problem with the numbers circulating in 2026, and it is the larger one: most of them describe a test that no longer exists. The official ETS notice states that "the testing supplier for the GACE changed from Educational Testing Service (ETS) to Evaluation Systems, Pearson (ES) effective July 1, 2025," with the last ETS content administration on June 15, 2025. The assessment was rebuilt in that handover. The combined Test I and Test II sat under code 501 is retired; on the current program site, Elementary Education (P–5) is test code 702, delivered as five separate testlets.

How the GACE Elementary Education assessment is actually scored

The current assessment is five standalone testlets of roughly 30 selected-response questions each. The program states plainly: "This assessment consists of five testlets. You must take all five testlets to complete the assessment." You do not have to sit them all at once, and each can be purchased on its own. These are the figures the program publishes.

Item	Official figure (Pearson program site, 2026)
Assessment and code	Elementary Education (P–5), test code 702
Structure	Five testlets (001 English Language Arts, 002 Mathematics, 003 Social Studies, 004 Science, 005 The Arts, Health, and Wellness); all five required
Questions	150 selected-response; approximately 30 per testlet
Testing time	240 minutes across the five testlets (45 / 60 / 45 / 45 / 45); the full assessment is listed at 255 minutes
Fee	$169 for the full assessment; $34 per individual testlet
Score scale	100 to 300
Passing score	"either 220 or 250, depending on the assessment"
Passing requirement (testlet model)	A cumulative point total at or above the assessment-level passing score, and meeting the floor on every individual testlet
Retakes	Any testlet may be retaken, even one you passed; 30-day wait; your best attempt at each testlet counts
Retired ETS version (through June 15, 2025)	Code 501, Test I + Test II, 150 selected-response plus 2 constructed-response, 240 minutes, $193 combined

A scaled score is not a percentage

This is where nearly every page ranking for this query goes wrong. The GACE reporting scale runs from 100 to 300, and 100 is the floor of the reporting scale — not a zero. A candidate who answers nothing does not score 0. So 220 is not "220 out of 300," and dividing 220 by 300 to produce 73% is arithmetic performed on a scale with an arbitrary origin. The result is a number with no meaning, and it is then quoted as "you need 73% to pass" or, worse, recycled as a pass rate.

Scaling exists precisely so that a percentage will not work. Raw points from forms of differing difficulty are converted onto a common scale so that 220 signifies the same level of skill whichever form you sat. If 220 always corresponded to a fixed share of items answered correctly, there would be no reason to scale anything.

Under the testlet model the reporting moves further from percentages, not closer. Your Testlet Performance Report shows your score on that testlet, whether the floor was met, and performance by objective. Your Comprehensive Assessment Report shows passing status, your best attempt at each testlet, and your cumulative total point amount. Points and floors, not percentages.

Why the numbers you find online disagree

They disagree because there is nothing authoritative to converge on, and because they are measuring at least three different things while calling all of them "the pass rate."

Most of them are stale. Figures written before mid-2025 describe the ETS assessment: two tests, six subareas, two constructed-response Analysis tasks. That test stopped being administered on June 15, 2025. Code 501 has since been reassigned entirely — on the current catalog it designates the Financial Literacy testlet inside Mathematics (6–12), test 711. A page that still calls Elementary Education "501" is not describing the exam you will sit.

Some of them are converted scaled scores. A meaningful share of "GACE pass rate" claims are just 220 divided by 300, dressed up. A required score and the proportion of candidates who achieve it are unrelated quantities.

A pass rate here would be genuinely ill-defined. You can take the five testlets on five different days, retake any of them after 30 days, and be credited with your best attempt at each. Passing is assembled across sittings, potentially over many months. The first-sitting rate, the per-testlet first-attempt rate, and the eventual rate are three different numbers, and no publisher reports any of them.

What GaPSC does publish is how the bar was set, not who cleared it. A standard setting study produces a recommended score from a panel of Georgia educators judging the performance of someone "just acceptably qualified" for beginning practice; those recommendations go to GaPSC, which "sets the final passing score for each assessment." Note also that on the current site, the assessments that display a numeric passing score are the certificate-upgrade and leadership ones, all at 250 — the professional-level bar. The 220 standard is the induction-level bar attached to initial content assessments. Candidates often assume they can choose between the two. They cannot: the level follows the assessment and the certificate you are pursuing, and Elementary Education (P–5) carries the initial-certificate use — GaPSC states it "can be used" for an initial teaching certificate or to add a teaching field, both requiring completion of a GaPSC-approved or accepted program in the field.

What separates passing from failing candidates

The published weights tell you more than any pass rate would, because the 2025 rebuild redistributed them substantially.

Testlet	Share	Questions	Time	Published objectives
001 English Language Arts (P–5)	20%	~30	45 min	Structures and conventions of standard English 50%; writing process and construction of texts 50%
002 Mathematics (P–5)	20%	~30	60 min	Numerical reasoning 33%; patterning and algebraic, geometric, and spatial reasoning 33%; measurement and data reasoning 33%
003 Social Studies (P–5)	20%	~30	45 min	Historical understandings 33%; geographic understandings 33%; government, civic, and economic understandings 33%
004 Science (P–5)	20%	~30	45 min	Earth and space science 33%; physical science 33%; life science 33%
005 The Arts, Health, and Wellness (P–5)	20%	~30	45 min	Visual and media arts 33%; performance arts — music, dance, theatre 33%; physical education, health, and wellness 33%

The floor is the trap, not the total. Two conditions must both hold: cumulative points at or above the assessment-level standard, and the floor met on every testlet. A strong mathematics performance cannot rescue a testlet that lands below its floor. This is the structural difference from the old 501, where a weak subarea could be absorbed by the rest of the test.

Arts, health, and wellness is now the most underestimated 20% on the exam. Under the retired ETS structure it was the smallest slice of Test II at 17% — roughly 8% of the whole assessment. It is now a full fifth of your points, with its own floor. Candidates who treat it as the throwaway testlet are the ones who fail on a floor.

Mathematics carries extra time, not extra weight. It is the only testlet given 60 minutes rather than 45, an official signal about item complexity. Its share fell from roughly a quarter of the old assessment to a flat 20%. Preparing in the old proportions overweights math and underweights everything in testlet 005.

Sequencing is now a real decision. Because testlets are sold separately at $34 and retakes require a 30-day wait, the order you sit them in determines your timeline. Taking your weakest testlet early leaves room for a retake; leaving it last can add a month before you are certifiable.

The bottom line

Nobody publishes a GACE Elementary Education pass rate, and in 2026 nobody sensibly could — the assessment was rebuilt fourteen months ago and passing is now assembled from best attempts across five separately scheduled testlets. What is official and verifiable: 150 selected-response questions across five testlets, 240 minutes of testing time, $169 for the full assessment or $34 per testlet, scores reported on a 100 to 300 scale with a passing score of 220 or 250 depending on the assessment, a per-testlet floor that must be met alongside the cumulative total, and a 30-day wait before any retake. If a page tells you the passing score is 73%, it has converted a scaled score into a percentage, and you can safely disregard everything else on it. The candidates who fail are rarely the ones who were weak overall — they are the ones who let a single testlet fall through the floor.

The useful next step is finding out which of the five testlets is your floor risk before you pay for it. Work through a free GACE Elementary Education practice test and pay attention to where your accuracy drops, not to your overall percentage.