TExES Core Subjects EC-6 (391) Pass Rate 2026

There is no official pass rate for the TExES Core Subjects EC-6 (391). Texas does publish educator certification pass rates, which makes this exam different from most, but the number it publishes is not the one you are looking for: the Texas Education Agency reports a certification examination pass rate as an accountability indicator for educator preparation programs, aggregated per program across the certifications its candidates pursue, and delivered through the ASEP dashboards on its consumer information pages. Pearson, which administers the exam for TEA, publishes no pass rate at all on the official 391 test page. So a statewide "what percent of people pass the 391" figure has no publisher, and every percentage you have seen attached to this exam came from somewhere other than the two organizations that hold the data.

How the TExES Core Subjects EC-6 is actually scored

The 391 is not one exam with one score. It is five separate subject exams sat in a single appointment, and each one carries its own independent passing standard. Here are the official numbers.

Item	Official value
Questions	210 selected-response, across five subject exams
Passing score	240 on each subject exam
Overall result	Reported as Passed or Not Passed — no total score
Time	Five-hour appointment (300 minutes), including a 15-minute tutorial and compliance agreement
Fee	$116 for the full five-subject exam; $58 for a subject exam taken separately
Format	Computer-administered test (CAT), by appointment year round
Retake	After 30 days; limited to five attempts per exam
Owner / administrator	Texas Education Agency, administered by Pearson

The single most misread number here is 240, and getting it right is most of the value of this page. 240 is a scaled score. It is not a percentage, and it is not a count of correct answers. You can prove that from the official numbers alone: the Mathematics subject exam contains 40 questions, and its passing score is 240. There is no way to get 240 of anything on a 40-question test. The same 240 threshold applies to all five subject exams even though they differ in length, 45 questions versus 40, and differ in time, 1 hour 10 minutes versus 35 minutes. A scaled score exists precisely so that one number can express the same standard across different question sets and different forms of the same test. It is the output of a conversion, not a fraction of the test.

Because that standard is applied per subject exam, there is no overall score to convert in the first place. The official test page states it plainly: "Results for the Core Subjects EC–6 (391) exam are reported as Passed or Not Passed, as there is no total passing score for the overall exam." Your score report tells you Passed or Not Passed, plus where you landed on each of the five. Nothing on it is a percentage of the whole exam, because no such quantity exists.

Why the pass rates you see online disagree

Four separate things are going wrong in the figures that rank for this query.

The percentages are reverse-engineered from 240. The most common claim, some version of "you need about 80% to pass," is arrived at by assuming the scaled score runs on a range the official page never publishes and then dividing. TEA publishes no scale range for the 391, no percent-correct requirement, and no raw-score requirement, and it could not publish a fixed one anyway: the raw-to-scaled conversion is equated to the specific form you sit, so the number of questions you need right is not a constant. A percentage derived this way is an assumption dressed up as a specification.

TEA's real data measures something else. The ASEP certification pass rate is a program accountability indicator. It answers "how did this preparation program's candidates do across their certification exams," which is a fair question about programs and a useless one about you. It is not a statewide 391 rate, and it is not broken out to exam 391 in the public consumer view.

The denominator is undefined. On a five-subtest exam, "pass rate" can mean the share of candidates who pass all five on the first sitting, the share who eventually pass all five, or the share of individual subject exams passed. A candidate who passes four and fails one has passed 80% of the subject exams and is recorded as Not Passed on the 391. Two sources counting differently will disagree by a wide margin while both being arithmetically honest.

Retakes quietly inflate everything. An exam can be retaken after 30 days, and candidates are allowed five attempts before needing a TEA test-limit waiver. Any cumulative pass rate is therefore a measure of persistence as much as preparation, and it will always sit far above a first-attempt rate for the same population.

What separates passing from failing candidates

The published content weights make the real difficulty obvious once you stop looking for a single percentage.

Subject exam	Questions	Testing time	Share of exam	Seconds per question	Passing score
English Language Arts and Reading (901)	45	1 hr 10 min	21.5%	~93	240
Mathematics (902)	40	1 hr 10 min	19%	~105	240
Social Studies (903)	40	50 min	19%	~75	240
Science (904)	45	55 min	21.5%	~73	240
Fine Arts, Health and Physical Education (905)	40	35 min	19%	~53	240

Your weakest subject is your score. Five independent thresholds mean the exam is decided by your worst area, not your average. Passing four subject exams and failing one produces the identical result as failing all five: Not Passed. Most candidates study roughly in proportion to their existing comfort, spending the most time on the subject they already like, which is exactly backwards on a structure like this one. The Fine Arts, Health and Physical Education subtest is where confident, well-prepared elementary candidates most often get caught, because it is the one nobody treats as a real subject.

Failing one subject and failing two are completely different outcomes. The retake policy allows you to retake a single subject exam only if you passed all of the others; if you did not pass two or more, you retake the overall exam. That is a cliff, not a slope. One weak subject costs $58 and one short appointment. Two weak subjects cost $116 and put all 210 questions back in front of you, including the three you already passed.

The clock is not distributed evenly. Mathematics gives you roughly 105 seconds per question. Fine Arts, Health and Physical Education gives you roughly 53, almost exactly half, for the same 40 questions. Science gives you about 73 seconds across the widest competency list on the exam. Candidates who pace themselves by a single mental average run out of time in the back half of the appointment, when the sections are shortest and fatigue is highest.

Breadth beats depth here. English Language Arts and Reading alone spans ten competencies, from oral language and word analysis through reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, writing conventions, viewing and representing, and assessment of developing literacy. Across all five subject exams you are being asked for generalist coverage at a specialist's threshold, five times over, and no substitution is permitted: per the official page, no other TExES exam substitutes for any of the individual subject exams.

The bottom line

No one publishes a pass rate for the TExES Core Subjects EC-6 (391). TEA's published certification pass rates are real, but they grade preparation programs, not this exam, and any statewide 391 percentage you find has been estimated by a third party. Ignore any source that converts 240 into a percent-correct, because that conversion requires information TEA does not publish and would not be stable across forms if it did. The only number that decides your outcome is five separate 240s, and the difference between failing one subject and failing two is the difference between a $58 retake and sitting the whole thing again after a 30-day wait. Budget your preparation the way the exam scores you: by your weakest subject, not your strongest.

The most useful thing you can do before you pay the $116 is find out which of the five is your 240 problem, while it still costs nothing to discover. Work through a free TExES Core Subjects EC-6 practice test and see which subject exam you would fail today.