I'm not even embarrassed to admit this anymore: I failed the RICA two times before finally passing last month. First attempt I went in underprepared thinking it would be similar to my CSET. It wasn't. Second time I used a random RICA study guide I found on Pinterest and scored a 217 — passing is 220. That near-miss was brutal.
What actually turned things around for me was getting serious about targeted practice. I spent about three weeks doing timed RICA practice test sets every single day, focusing hard on the phonological awareness and systematic explicit instruction strands because those were consistently killing my score. I also rewatched my credential program notes on the Simple View of Reading — way more of that shows up than I expected.
If you're in the middle of prep right now, I'd genuinely love to compare notes. What's tripping you up? For me it was distinguishing between phonemic awareness vs. phonics instruction in scenario questions. Those felt almost identical until I slowed way down on them.