FSOT Score Breakdown
I got my foreign service score breakdown in the mail yesterday:
Job Knowledge: 60.63
Biographic Info: 46.58
English Expression: 59.74
Total: 166.95
Essay: 8
According to the letter, I had to get at least a 154 on the multiple choice in order to have my essay graded. A passing score on the essay was a 6, with 12 points possible. For the multiple choice sections, no one knows how many points are possible for each section, but I can make a pretty good guess.
I belong to the Foreign Service Officer Test Yahoo Group. There’s a database in the group where people enter their results once they receive their score breakdown. While the database for the 2008 exam currently only has 48 useable entries, I can still take the highest reported scores and make a few hypotheses.
Highest scores as reported on the FSOT Yahoo Group:
Job Knowledge: 63.43
Biographic Info: 72.85 (how did they do that!)
English Expression: 62.22
Total: 198.5
Essay: 12 (well, we knew that one already)
From this, I would suppose that the highest score may be around 75 for each section? Who knows!
Edit: The general consensus at the Yahoo board is 80 points per section, but still, this is all speculation, no one really knows for certain. Well, the State Department Board of Examiners and ACT know, but they certainly aren’t going to share with the rest of us.
And just for kicks, here’s the mean:
Job Knowledge: 58.28
Biographic Info: 52.93
English Expression: 57.40
Total: 168.61
Essay: 7.5
and the median:
Job Knowledge: 58.01
Biographic Info: 50.47
English Expression: 57.21
Total: 165.69 (based on the above)
Essay: 8
I thought about doing the mode, but since there are only 48 scores, and they calculate to the hundredth, it didn’t make too much sense to do. So I was just above average in this group, with the exception of the biography. But, how do I compare to my previous score? Well, it’s a slightly different test, but i was still able to look up that score.
Job Knowledge: 57.89 (2.74 point gain)
Biographic Info: 42.25 (4.33 point gain)
English Expression: 55.23 (4.51 point gain)
Total: 155.37 (11.58 point gain!)
Essay: n/a (since I didn’t pass that time, it wasn’t graded)
The bottom line is, I passed! But sometimes it’s fun to run the numbers and do some comparisons.
Congratulations, Melissa ! I know you’re excited to take another step forward. Good luck, also with the proposal you worked so hard on.
Congratulations to CHAD, also on making the Deans List ! \
You two have an exciting life and I’m happy for you.
Still remembering a wonderful week together in Hawaii and so thankful I was able to share it with you. Almost a year ! YAY One down, 60 to go !
: – )
Love you guys – Aunt Pat
Hey Chad,
Just received my FSOT scores in the mail today and was wondering the same things you were i.e. what were the high scores, average etc. They don’t give you a whole lot of info but thanks to the wonderful world of those little particle thingies bouncing around through wire and space I was able to find your Blog and what I was looking for. (Thanks for doing the math; I didn’t want to take of my shoes today to count)
Let me say “congrats” on your scores and your first year of marriage. I just celebrated my one year this month. I scored a “178″ and funny enough our Job Knowledge Score was exactly the same. You weren’t looking on my paper were you?:-) You had a point higher in the English but where I did well was in the bio info part. Personally, I thought that was the hardest section because if you actually tried to fill in all the blanks with all the times you rescued cats from trees, organized gala events for the Pope and saved the world with just some bubble gum and bailing wire then you ran out of time. But in my defense, I was able to answer all the questions and all but one with blanks citing multiple examples. But then the scoring is all government voodoo anyway. We PASSED!!!!
They’re telling me that I’ll hear in November whether I’ll be invited to the Oral Interview or not. Is that what you’ve been told? I’ve also read the point slate is wiped clean and it’s all up to the subjective panel scoring that we get on our one-day long oral interview.
Best of luck, maybe I’ll see ya there!!!
Jason
Hi Jason,
I promise I was not looking at your screen during the Job Knowledge portion of the test. Especially since I tested on a Thursday morning in Virginia, and I assume that you tested from Germany? Congrats on passing this hurdle of the FSOT (and happy anniversary)!
The bio is what got me the last time too. I finished that section with about 20 seconds to spare. In contrast, I finished the job knowledge and English expression sections with 20 MINUTES to spare. I just don’t know about that bio section, but at this point, I don’t care – i passed! I think it will be interesting to see if there’s any correlation between a high bio score and a passing score on the QEP. If so, then you’re in luck and I’ll probably be testing again next year!
I heard we find out “by December” if we’ve passed the QEP. These results came to us two weeks earlier than the given time frame, so I hope we also receive the QEP score sooner than expected.
I highly recommend the FSOT yahoo groups – I never post there, but I’ve gotten a log of really good information. They confirm that our written exam scores don’t matter, but the (passing) oral exam scores are pivotal in determining one’s place on ‘the list.’
Good luck to you too – stop by and let me know if you pass!
Melissa
(so far, Chad hasn’t show any interest in taking the FSOT =)
I’m so glad I found this website. I just took the FSOT on Feb 13th. I’ll be interested to see how I did! Now I have a score breakdown available to compare my scores against. Thanks so much!
Becca
Hi Becca,
I’m glad you’ve found my guesswork helpful, just please keep in mind that this pulls from a very small sample of self reporters and should be taken with a grain of salt!
Good on you for taking the exam – I hope you get the chance to go on to the next step
A further thought re the guess of each multiple choice section being worth 80 points max: that doesn’t sound entirely reasonable because it would suggest that the test taker only had to pass approx. 65% of the questions (154 out of 240) for them to grade the essays. Seems too low of a threshold. That would likely lead to a lot of work for the essay readers, remembering that it is three readers per passing candidate. Also, it would mean that the max. Yahoo group score is only 83% correct (199 out of 240) Given the intensity and focus of this self-selected group and large enough sample size, there should be a statistical bias toward the perfect score so it seems logical that there would be at least a few close-to-perfect scorers for each of the sections. I suppose it’s splitting hairs in the end, but I would guess that the max. points attainable might be something around 200 to 220. But, of course, all that really matters in the end is whether one passes or not!
Barb,
You assume that the “80 points max” entails 80 questions on each section. This, at least in my experience, is not the case. I took the FSOT today and I don’t recall any of the section having 80 questions.
Just like the GRE the scoring is not a 1 to 1 equivalent, thus 80 might possibly be the max, or it may not. Who knows?
Melissa, Jason,
Did you pass the QEP? Invitation to the oral? Pass the oral?
Let us know.
Sandy,
If you take a look through the rest of my website (especially the foreign service category), you’ll see that I did pass the QEP, Orals, Medical and am now waiting on my Security Clearance. I really do need to write a post about my security clearance experience so far. Perhaps I’ll go an do that now.
Hi –
You mention a highest score total of 198.5 points. But it looks like you got this just by taking the sum of (highest knowledge) + (highest biographic) + (highest English)… and it’s unlikely that it was the same candidate who scored the top in each of these three categories. So, assuming this is right: What is the highest individual total from the scores posted? Thanks!
Hank –
The short answer is that no one knows. This is all conjecture and guesswork on my part. That highest score total pretty much came from guessing as well. If you want further theories and hypotheses, I recommend the FSOT and FSOA Yahoo Groups (links on the left).
Thanks Melissa! I just checked out the FSOT Yahoo group, and as you mention there is a very useful database of scores there. I looked at the data for 232 test-takers, and did some more statistics on it — similar to yours, just in a bit more details. The full analysis is on my webpage, at http://eaubergine.com/blog/?p=7 . And the executive summary:
1. If you pass the multiple-choice part, you’re 96% certain to pass the essay as well.
2. The scores on the Job Knowledge and English sections are quantized (binned). Although they are reported to four digits of precision, there’s only about 18 different possible scores.
3. The reported scores are claimed to be T-scores, but deviate from this a little bit (e.g., don’t always have a stdev of 10).
4. The Biographic Information section is scored in a fundamentally different (and unknown) way than the Job Knowledge & English sections.
5. If you score well on the Biographic section (more than one standard deviation above the mean, i.e., > 60 points, i.e., top 15%), you’ve got a 96% chance of passing the whole test.
6. Doing well on the English section is no guarantee you’ll do well on the Essay.
7. The Essay is probably graded by two people, who add their scores.
8. Studying doesn’t help.
To pass the FSOT you must attain a score greater than 70 percent or a point score of 154 or greater, therefore, the highest point score possible is 220. (220 X.70 = 154).
Your thoughts?
Hank – Studying definitely helps! It helped me, that’s why I wrote a whole post on it. :-)
TB – mmmm, not exactly. The point scores and percentages change with the needs of the department. If they need a 1000 candidates (I just pulled a nice round number out of my head) to take the oral assessment, then they may need 500 candidates to pass each round of the written and go on to the QEP/PNQ/whatever-they’re-calling-it-these-days so they can then choose 330 to go on to the OA. So for the written, they’ll figure out the score they need to get the 500 (totally made up number), and pass everyone who has it. So one year you may need a 154 to pass, and the next year you need a 160, or a 150. Keeping that in mind, we can’t be 100% sure of what that highest possible point score is. But it certainly is fun to guess!
I would say that studying helps. Studying the official test guidebook will help your score quite a bit. Of course, the range of things that they can ask you is immeasurably wide, but the questions in the study guide are very useful.
Melissa,
Thanks for the information. Just got my FSOT results, and they are almost exactly the same as yours were. So hopefully that means I have a shot of getting to and through the oral exams too. (Though I think my personal narratives were a little weak). I second your question of what other people put to get such high Biographic Information scores. Mine was below 50, but I made up for it in the other sections.