I graduated with my education degree last December and I've been prepping for the ILTS Elementary Education content area test. The exam is 125 questions and I'm scoring around 220-230 on practice when passing is 240 out of 300, so I need to close 15-20 points in 6 weeks.
Science is killing me. I minored in history and my natural science background is weak - I'm dropping about 40% of those questions. Physical science and earth science subareas are tested more heavily than I expected given that elementary teachers don't usually go deep into those topics.
I'm studying 2 hours a day, content review in the morning and practice questions in the evening. Math was better than I feared at 80%+ consistently. Reading and language arts is solid around 75%.
Is there a reliable breakdown of how many questions come from each subarea? The ILTS site shows percentage ranges but it's hard to build a plan around something like 16-24%.
Science is the most common reason people fail ILTS Elementary. Allocate at least 45 minutes of your daily 2 hours to science content until you're consistently above 65% on those questions.
I went from a 228 practice score to a 252 on the actual exam over 8 weeks. Most of that came from drilling earth science specifically - plate tectonics, rock cycles, and weather systems.
The social science section has a lot of Illinois-specific history and geography content. I lost 8-10 points there that I didn't expect to lose at all.
The breakdown I used was roughly Language Arts 35%, Math 20%, Science 22%, Social Science 23%. That's informal but it matched my actual exam distribution pretty closely.
I was in almost the exact same spot last year, scored a 232 on my first attempt and it stung because I thought I was close enough to wing it. What I changed the second time was honestly boring but it worked. I stopped taking full practice tests over and over and started drilling my weakest subarea only, for me that was science too. Two weeks of nothing but science content review and question sets before I touched another full-length test. My science subscore jumped like 30 points and it pulled the whole composite up with it.
Other thing I'd say is don't ignore your strong areas completely, you can leak points there while you're grinding science. I did quick maintenance sets a few times a week, stuff like the ones at ilts/questions/english language arts, just 15 or 20 questions to keep it fresh. It's not glamorous but it kept my ELA score from sliding. Six weeks is plenty if you're surgical about it. You've got this.
I failed it the first time by 8 points and I'll be honest, I thought I was ready. What I changed for round two was stopping the passive review and actually writing out explanations like I was teaching the content to someone else. Science was my weak spot too, so I drilled earth science and life science almost exclusively for three weeks. It hurt but it worked.
One thing I didn't do enough the first time was practice ELA under timed conditions, and that's where I lost points I shouldn't have. The ilts/questions/english language arts section has some tricky literary analysis stuff that looks easy until the clock is running. You've got 6 weeks which is honestly enough time if you get specific about your weak subareas instead of reviewing everything evenly. Good luck, you're closer than you think.
Honestly I almost quit after week three. I was still at 225 and started convincing myself I just wasn't cut out for it. What finally helped me was drilling specific subareas instead of reviewing everything equally -- science was rough for me too but ELA was actually dragging me down more than I realized. I spent a solid week on just the literacy and language stuff, used the ilts/questions/english language arts 3 practice set until I could do it in my sleep, and picked up maybe 8 points just there.
Six weeks is enough. You're not starting from zero, you're at 225 which means the foundation is there. Stop reviewing what you already know and be brutal about finding the two or three subareas that are actually costing you points. I passed at 247 last month and a week before the exam I genuinely didn't think I would. Keep going.
The wrong-answer method genuinely changed everything for me on this exam. Instead of just noting what the right answer was, I'd write down exactly why each wrong choice was wrong — like, what specific misconception it was testing. For science especially, this helped me stop falling for answers that sounded scientific but missed the core concept. It takes longer per question but you're actually building understanding instead of just pattern-matching.
Also don't neglect ELA even if it feels like your stronger area — the questions get surprisingly tricky on things like phonemic awareness vs. phonics distinctions. I spent a solid week on ilts/questions/english language arts 3 practice and found it exposed gaps I didn't know I had. Six weeks is actually a decent runway if you're strategic about it — you've got this.