PART 8

SCORING YOUR PRACTICE ORAL EXAMINATION

To score your practice examination, you will need to print one document from the attachments for each test part listed at the bottom of this page. The document you need to print is the written text of the test material that has scoring units underlined and numbered on the text. You will also need to play back your performance on the tape recorder. 

When you are ready to score your test you should have your performance tape ready to play and the test text that contains underlined, numbered scoring units in front of you. Start the tape recorder and follow along on the test script as you listen. When you come to a scoring unit that you find was missing from your rendition, or was interpreted incorrectly, mark that unit on your test script with an “X.” (Professional test raters use parenthesis marks to keep track of segments of text that are missing completely. They also try to annotate the text with notes about what they hear, if they notice a mistake.) If your attention wanders or you are not sure about whether what you rendered as your interpretation was correct, mark that unit with a question mark. You can then go back afterward to listen again to parts that you may have missed or have a question about. We strongly recommend that you do not stop the recording until your entire performance on that test part is concluded. 

After you have listened all the way through and checked any of the scoring units you were uncertain of, count up all the X marks and subtract them from the total number of units for that part of the test. For example, there are 17 scoring units on the English sight-translation passage. If you marked 5 of them with an X, the number interpreted correctly is 12. The percent score on that part then would be 70.6 (12/17). 

Finally, you may want to compare your performance to a recording of another interpreter’s rendering of the test. The recording you will use is a passing performance by a federally certified interpreter.  It is not a “perfect” interpretation, and you should not expect that it will be entirely free of errors or renderings that could use improvement. Also keep in mind that the model performance represents how one interpreter accomplished a passing performance on the test. Your performance may have varied substantially while still satisfactorily preserving the meaning of the test text. 

Above all else, remember that conservation of meaning is what the test raters look for and they will mark as acceptable any renderings that meet that criterion. 

To print the attachments, click on the hyperlinks below:

Part 1 - Practice Sight Translation English and Spanish - Marked Copies 
Part 2 - Practice Simultaneous Monologue - Marked Copy    

Part 3 - Practice Consecutive – Marked Copy  

Part 4 - Practice Simultaneous Q&A – Marked Copy   

Passing performances can be heard by opening the audio files and clicking on the corresponding track. 

Part 1 - Sight translations  Open the audio file.  Listen to Part 1 Track 38 for English to Spanish and Part 1 Track 39 for Spanish to English. 

Part 2 - Simultaneous monologue  Open the audio file.  Listen to Part 2 Track 40.

Part 4 - Simultaneous witness examination  Open the audio file.  Listen to Part 4 Track 42.

If you followed the suggested steps you should now have a very good idea of what the Oral Examination is like.  Depending on how closely you tried to simulate actual testing procedure and how careful you were when you scored your own performance, you may also have some indication of your readiness to take the Oral Examination.  Keep in mind in regard to self-scoring that the model performance represents how one interpreter accomplished a passing performance on the test.  Your performance may have varied substantially from the model while still satisfactorily preserving the meaning of the test text. 

Disclaimer:  Remember that this is a sample test for practice and is not intended to accurately predict your performance on the operational version of the examination.  You should keep in mind that your performance on this same test would probably vary on different occasions, depending on many factors.  Also, you will take a different test when you take the official examination.  While the actual test you take will be very similar in structure and difficulty, your performance may vary significantly on that day on that test than your performance on this test – for better or worse.