Before anything else
Sit Part One and Part Two on different days if the window and your schedule allow it. The both-parts
appointment is 8 hours 40 minutes including a 40-minute lunch, and it is not a knowledge problem — it is
a stamina problem, and stamina is the one thing you cannot cram in the last week. The catch is that SDL windows are
only about eleven days long, so two separate seats are not always available. If you do sit both in one day, the
40 minutes in the middle is not a break; it is a reset, and there is a protocol for it below.
What the day is made of
Both parts have exactly the same shape. Nothing about 103 and 104 differs structurally — only the content and the names of the two written assignments.
4 hrs
Testing time per part — 240 minutes
60
Selected-response items — 50% of the score
2
Written assignments — the other 50%
+15
Minutes for tutorial and NDA, outside the four hours
| Part | Assignment One — short, 17% | Assignment Two — long, 33% |
|---|---|---|
| 103 Part One |
Work Product 150–300 words · Subarea I, vision and communication |
Case Study 300–600 words · Subarea II, change and accountability |
| 104 Part Two |
Management Problem Solving 150–300 words · Subarea II, resources and compliance |
Educational Program Analysis 300–600 words · Subarea I, the district educational programme — and the one with the Document tabs |
On both parts, Assignment One is the short 17% task and Assignment Two is the long 33% task. On 104 that means the long task comes from Subarea I and the short one from Subarea II — the reverse of 103. Do not walk in expecting the subareas to appear in order.
The two interface facts that change your plan
One: you may complete the assignments in either order, and you may return to either as time
permits — the test imposes no section order and no per-section clock. Every minute of the four hours is yours
to allocate, which means the allocation is your responsibility and nobody will warn you.
Two: on the Educational Program Analysis (104, Assignment Two), the assignment does not fit on one
screen. To see all of it you must click buttons at the top of the screen labelled “Document 1,”
“Document 2,” and so on. Candidates have written whole responses off Document 1 because they never
noticed the tabs. Click every tab before you write a word. Some assignments also need the scroll bar to show
the full charge — scroll to the bottom of every prompt.
The week before
Logistics
- Confirm the date, reporting time and centre address on your appointment confirmation — and confirm the date falls inside an SDL window, which is not the same calendar as the SBL windows
- Check the ID rules on NYSTCE’s test policies page — your name must match your registration exactly
- Plan the route, the parking and the walk from the car; add 30 minutes of slack
- Run the free computer-based testing tutorial at home so the 15 minutes on the day is a formality, not a first encounter
- If you need alternative testing arrangements and have not requested them, it is already late — do it now
Preparation
- Write one full timed Assignment Two — 300–600 words in 72 minutes — for each part you are sitting. Timed. On a keyboard. Not in your head
- Write one full timed Assignment One — 150–300 words in 33 minutes
- Do a 60-item selected-response block against a clock and find out what your real pace is
- Re-read the three scoring criteria until PURPOSE · APPLICATION OF CONTENT · SUPPORT is automatic, and re-read the distractor taxonomy
- Stop adding new content four days out. After that, only rehearse what you already have
The night before
Do
- Lay out ID, confirmation details, keys, glasses and layers — test centres run cold and you cannot fix it once seated
- Pack lunch and water now if you are sitting both parts, so the 40 minutes is not spent hunting for food
- One light pass of the Cheatsheet — the four subareas, the sixteen objectives, the 50/50 split
- One light pass of the four skeletons in the Task Playbook
- Set two alarms
- Sleep. At this point sleep is worth more than another hour of items, and on an eight-hour appointment it is worth considerably more
Do not
- Do not learn anything new. New content the night before displaces retrieval of old content and buys you nothing on a 60-item sample.
- Do not take a full practice part. You will arrive already fatigued for the one that counts.
- Do not re-plan your pacing. Pick the clock below, or the alternative, and commit. Deciding at 0:00 on the day costs you ten real minutes.
- Do not caffeine-load beyond your normal amount. Four hours is a long time to be jittery and a longer time to crash.
What to bring, and what will be taken off you
SDL is delivered at Pearson VUE test centres — NYSTCE calls them Pearson Professional Centers. Security is airport-adjacent and non-negotiable.
Bring
- Current, valid, government-issued photo ID bearing your signature, with the name exactly as registered. This is the one item that cannot be worked around at the desk.
- Your appointment details — date, time, test codes, centre address.
- Layers. Sweater or jacket you can put on and take off.
- If you are sitting both parts: lunch and water, packed. Protein and slow carbohydrate, not a heavy meal.
- Arrive 30 minutes early. Check-in involves ID verification, a digital signature, a photograph and a locker; arriving late can cost you the seat and the fee.
Leave in the locker — or at home
- No reference materials of any kind. This is stated in the official written-assignment directions: “You may not use any reference materials during the test.” Nothing you have not memorized is available to you.
- No calculator. The numbers in the exhibits are there to be read, compared and reasoned about — a budget line that is up 18% while enrolment is flat is an argument, not an arithmetic problem. If you find yourself wanting to compute to the dollar, you have misread the charge.
- No phone, watch, bag, notes, books or food at the desk. Everything goes in a locker. Smart watches and fitness trackers count as phones.
- Note materials are issued by the centre, not brought by you. Use whatever they hand you for outlining; your response must be typed in the on-screen answer box.
- Confirm the current list on NYSTCE’s test policies page before you travel — policies change and the centre enforces the current one.
The 15 minutes before the clock starts
The computer-based testing tutorial and the nondisclosure agreement take 15 minutes and are not part of your four hours. That is 15 free minutes. Most candidates waste them.
−0:15
The nondisclosure agreement. Read it, accept it. It is the promise not to reproduce or disclose test content — which is also why no honest site can show you a live form.
−0:12
The tutorial. Find, deliberately: the review / flag control, how to move between items, the scroll bar inside a prompt, the Document tab buttons, and the word-count display on the answer box. Locating these now costs nothing; locating them at 1:40 costs minutes you were going to spend writing.
−0:04
Write your fixed numbers down on the notepad the centre gave you, before the clock starts: 0:05 · 1:35 · 2:52 · 3:25 · 3:47. Those are your five checkpoints from the plan below. Under them, leave two blank lines labelled A1 and A2 — that is where the required counts from each charge go.
−0:01
Decide nothing else. Order chosen, checkpoints written, hands off. Begin.
A word-count display in the answer box is a standard feature of this Pearson constructed-response interface; the SDL written-assignment directions themselves do not describe it, so confirm where it is during the tutorial rather than assuming its position.
The arithmetic behind the plan
Before the clock, the maths. Every pacing recommendation on this page is derived from these numbers, and if you disagree with the numbers you should change the plan.
| Quantity | Figure | What it implies |
|---|---|---|
| Testing time per part | 240 minutes | Four hours. The 15 minutes of tutorial and NDA are separate and do not extend this. |
| 60 items at 90 seconds each | 90 minutes | 60 × 90 s = 5,400 s = exactly 90 minutes. That is 37.5% of your testing time buying 50% of your score. |
| What is left | 150 minutes | 240 − 90. Everything else — reading the charges, both assignments, the flagged-item sweep and the final audit — comes out of this. |
| Of that, on the writing itself | 105 minutes | 72 on Assignment Two (33%) and 33 on Assignment One (17%) — a 2.2 : 1 split against a 2 : 1 difference in weight, deliberately tilted toward the long task because it has documents to read. |
| Minutes per score-percent | 1.8 vs 2.1 | 90 min ÷ 50% = 1.8 minutes per percentage point on multiple choice. 105 min ÷ 50% = 2.1 on the writing. Near parity, tilted slightly toward the half where an extra minute actually changes a rating. |
| Drafting rate you need | about 12 words/min | A 500-word Assignment Two inside a 42-minute drafting block is 11.9 words a minute of finished prose. That is slow typing and hard thinking — which is the correct ratio. If you have never written at that rate against a clock, that is the rehearsal to do this week. |
| If you run 75 s per item instead | 75 minutes | Frees 15 minutes. Put them in the Assignment Two drafting block, not in the sweep. |
| If you run 2 minutes per item | 120 minutes | This is the failure mode. Half your testing time on half your score leaves 120 minutes for two assignments, a sweep and an audit — and the 33% task gets squeezed first. If you are at item 30 and the clock says 1:05, you are running two minutes an item. Speed up immediately. |
One part · the four-hour clock
Multiple choice first. It is the work that degrades least under fatigue and the work you can safely defer part of — so it goes early, and its leftovers absorb whatever the writing actually costs.
0:00–0:05
Read both charges. Write nothing else. Open Assignment One and Assignment Two, scroll each to the bottom, and on 104 click every Document tab so you know how many there are. On your notepad write, for each: the task type, the word range, and the required counts — how many issues, how many actions, how many strengths, how many justifications the charge demands. Those numbers are what you audit against at 3:47.
0:05–1:35
All 60 selected-response items — 90 seconds each. Answer every item as you pass it, even the ones you flag: a flagged item with a guess in it is insurance, a flagged blank is not. Flag anything that has taken 90 seconds and move on without looking back. Do not revisit flags yet.
1:35–1:40
Reset. Eyes off the screen. Re-read the charge of Assignment Two and the counts you wrote at 0:05. You are about to spend 72 minutes on a third of the test; enter it deliberately rather than by drifting into it.
1:40–2:52
Assignment Two — the long, 33% task. Case Study on 103, Educational Program Analysis on 104. Inside the 72 minutes: 12 minutes reading the case or all the documents and marking evidence, 8 minutes outlining one line per charge bullet, 42 minutes drafting, 10 minutes revising against the three criteria. Target 450–550 words — comfortably inside 300–600, and long enough to support every claim.
2:52–3:25
Assignment One — the short, 17% task. Work Product on 103, Management Problem Solving on 104. Inside the 33 minutes: 5 minutes planning, 20 minutes drafting, 8 minutes revising. Stop at 300–340 words. This task has a narrow charge and a rehearsable shape; giving it an hour is the commonest way to end up thin on the task worth twice as much.
3:25–3:47
The flagged items. Work the flags in order. Anything still unresolved after 60 seconds: pick the best remaining option and clear the flag. Confirm that no item anywhere is unanswered — there is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a blank is a guaranteed zero you chose.
3:47–4:00
The charge audit. Open each assignment and point, physically, at the paragraph that answers each bullet of its charge. Count your issues, actions, strengths and justifications against the numbers on your notepad. Confirm every action is stated as something you will do, not something that should have been done. Confirm your name appears nowhere in either answer box.
Practitioner-recommended, not official. The four hours of testing time and the separate 15 minutes for tutorial and nondisclosure agreement are official; the internal allocation is ours — the test allocates no time to any section. This clock matches the one in the Task Playbook to within a few minutes; the difference is that the Playbook budgets 80 seconds per item and this page budgets 90, which moves eight minutes from the sweep into the writing.
Three hard checkpoints — these are the whole plan
1:35 — you are out of the multiple-choice section, finished or not. Items you flagged are waiting for
you at 3:25. Items you never reached are not.
2:52 — Assignment Two has a complete draft. Every bullet answered, every count hit, even if the prose is rough. Polish scores nothing; a missing third action costs a rating point.
3:25 — both answer boxes contain complete drafts. Nothing else happens — not a flagged item, not a rewrite — until this is true.
2:52 — Assignment Two has a complete draft. Every bullet answered, every count hit, even if the prose is rough. Polish scores nothing; a missing third action costs a rating point.
3:25 — both answer boxes contain complete drafts. Nothing else happens — not a flagged item, not a rewrite — until this is true.
The alternative order
Write first, if your writing degrades badly when tired
Charges 0:00–0:06 · Assignment Two 0:06–1:21 (75 min) · Assignment One 1:21–1:54 (33) · reset 1:54–2:00 · all 60 items 2:00–3:40 at 100 seconds each (60 × 100 s = 100 min) · audit and unanswered-item sweep 3:40–4:00. It totals 240 exactly. The cost is that you meet the items tired and with less slack — the benefit is that the 33% task gets your best hour. Pick one version this week and rehearse it; do not choose on the day.
The trade you make when you fall behind
Cut from the sweep, never from a charge
A rushed guess on a flagged item costs you a fraction of one item out of sixty — roughly 0.8% of the test. A charge bullet left unanswered costs you on PURPOSE across a whole assignment worth 17% or 33%. That ratio is not close. When time is short, the flagged items pay for the writing.
Both parts in one appointment
8 hours 40 minutes, including a 40-minute lunch. Here is what that figure actually contains, and how to spend the middle 40 minutes.
Check the arithmetic of the published figure
240 + 40 + 240 = 520 minutes = 8 hours 40 minutes exactly. The published total is the two testing sessions
plus the lunch, and nothing else. It does not appear to contain the 15 minutes of tutorial and nondisclosure
agreement, and it certainly does not contain check-in, ID verification, the locker, the photograph, or the
re-verification after lunch. Plan a nine-and-a-half-hour day on site, and arrange your travel, parking and
childcare around that, not around 8:40. This is our arithmetic on the published number, not an NYSTCE statement
about the schedule — confirm your reporting and release times on your own appointment confirmation.
−0:30
Arrive. Check-in, ID, signature, photograph, locker. Do not read anything while you queue.
0:00
Tutorial and NDA, 15 minutes, outside the testing clock. Run the checklist from the section above.
0:15
Part One begins. Four hours on the clock above. Treat it as the whole day; do not pace yourself “for two parts.” Holding energy back costs you real points now to protect a session you have not reached.
4:15
Part One ends. Lunch — 40 minutes. The protocol is below. Note that signing out and back in is part of the 40, not additional to it.
4:55
Part Two begins. Four more hours. Consider the write-first order here even if you used items-first in the morning — see the note below.
8:55
Done. Sign out, retrieve the locker, and go home. Do not reconstruct answers in the car park.
Elapsed times from the start of the tutorial, assuming one tutorial block. Wall-clock times depend on your reporting time.
The 40 minutes, minute by minute
0–5 sign out, locker, restroom — this is real time, spend it fast. 5–20 eat: protein and slow carbohydrate, moderate portion. A heavy meal buys you a 2 p.m. crash inside the 33% task. 20–30 outside, daylight, walk. No phone. 30–35 water, layers, restroom again. 35–40 back at the desk and re-verified. You get roughly 25 usable minutes out of the 40 — budget accordingly.
The one rule about lunch
Do not review anything and do not relitigate Part One. It is submitted. Nothing you remember about it can be changed, and every minute spent on it imports anxiety into a part that is worth exactly as much. If a colleague texts asking how it went, do not answer until the day is over. Do not look at the Cheatsheet, do not look at this page, do not look at your phone.
Afternoon adjustment
Part Two’s long task, the Educational Program Analysis, is the heaviest reading on the assessment — multiple documents behind tabs — and it lands when you are five hours in. If you are going to switch to the write-first order for one part, switch for this one: charges, then Assignment Two while you can still hold five documents in your head, then Assignment One, then the sixty items at 100 seconds each.
When you are stuck on an item
You have 90 seconds. Here is what to do with them.
0–15 s
Read the last line of the stem again. Most SDL items ask something narrower than the scenario implies — first step, most appropriate, best demonstrates. The qualifier is usually what is separating the options, not the content.
15–45 s
Eliminate on behaviour, not on plausibility. Cut the option that acts before gathering information; the one that solves it personally instead of building capacity; the one that addresses a person when the stem describes a system; the one that is lawful but unilateral where the stem hands you a stakeholder. See the distractor taxonomy.
45–75 s
If two remain, ask which one a superintendent could defend to a board. Not which is nicer — which survives the question “why did you do that?” Then answer.
75–90 s
Answer anyway and flag it. Never leave the item blank on the way past. A guess costs nothing and a blank cannot score. Then move — the marginal minute is worth far more inside a 33% assignment than on your fourth pass at one item.
The trap that eats the most time
An item where you can construct a story in which each of two options is right. That is a sign you are adding facts
the stem did not give you. Strip your reasoning back to what is written. If the stem does not say the
principal has been consulted, she has not been. If it does not say the data are disaggregated, they are not. The
key is nearly always the option that needs the fewest assumptions.
When Assignment Two is running out of time
This is the emergency worth rehearsing, because it is the one that costs a whole part. Triage by how much time is left.
| Time left | State you are in | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 25 minutes | Draft covers about half the charge | Stop expanding and start covering. Write one short paragraph for each remaining charge bullet — claim, then one sentence of support. Do not go back and improve anything you have already written. Breadth across the charge is PURPOSE; depth on one bullet is not. |
| 15 minutes | Two or three bullets untouched | Skeleton every remaining bullet in one or two sentences each. A thin response that addresses every part of the charge outscores a polished response that addresses half of it — the criteria are applied to the whole response, and an unaddressed bullet is a hole in PURPOSE that nothing else repairs. |
| 8 minutes | One bullet left, response is short | Answer the last bullet. Then stop. Do not chase the word count. 300–600 words is guidance about what a full answer usually takes, not a threshold you are scored against — you are scored on purpose, application of content and support. A complete 340-word response beats an incomplete 600-word one. |
| 4 minutes | Assignment One is still empty | Abandon Assignment Two immediately and write something in Assignment One. Even three sentences that engage the charge. An empty box is scored blank, which is not a low score — it is nothing at all, on a task worth 17% or 33%. This is the only situation in which you should walk away from unfinished work on the bigger task. |
Why the counts on your notepad exist
Almost every way a strong candidate loses points on the SDL written section is a counting failure: the charge asked
for three actions and the response gave two; it asked you to justify each action and the response
justified the first; it asked for a strength and a weakness and got one of each for only two of the three
documents. You wrote those numbers down at 0:05 precisely so that at 3:47 you can check them without re-reading
the whole prompt.
The last ten minutes
Work this list in order. It recovers more points per minute than anything else available to you at that point in the test.
The writing
- Every bullet of every charge has a paragraph you can point at — both assignments
- Counts match the numbers on your notepad: issues, actions, strengths, weaknesses, justifications
- Every action is something you will do, in the future, stated as a step — not a critique of what someone should have done
- Every claim has support behind it: an example from the documents, or explicit reasoning
- You cited the case or the documents specifically — on 104, by document number
- Your name appears nowhere in either answer box
- Both answer boxes actually contain text. Look at both. Confirm it with your eyes, not your memory
The items
- Every one of the 60 items has an answer selected — use the review screen, not your recollection
- All flags cleared, or at least answered under flag
- No item changed in the last two minutes on a hunch — late changes on judgment items are usually worse than the first read
- Then stop. Sitting with the remaining seconds and second-guessing a scenario item is how good responses get damaged
After the test
Getting the result
- Scores post online beginning at 10:00 p.m. on the score report date for the window you tested in — roughly two and a half weeks after the window closes.
- The date is fixed by the window, not by the day you sat. Testing on day one of a window gets you the same score date as testing on day eleven.
- You get a scaled score and a pass/fail decision for each part separately; 220 passes. There is no combined SDL score. NYSTCE's free explainers — How to Read Your Score Report and Understanding Candidate Score Reports — explain each block of the report, including how performance is reported by subarea and for the written section.
- Scores are transmitted to NYSED automatically and attach to your certification file.
If you did not pass
- Check the waiver score before you book anything. NYSED will consider waiving a score within 0.5 SEM of passing: 212 on 103, 211 on 104 — with an overall GPA of 3.5 or higher on a conferred bachelor’s or master’s degree and an active application in TEACH. See Start Here for the conditions and the NYSED page.
- Otherwise: 30-day wait before retaking the same test, and you must reregister and pay the full fee again. You retake only the failed part.
- The window calendar, not the 30-day rule, is what actually sets your date. SDL windows are two to five months apart. Look at the calendar before you plan a study schedule — there is no benefit to being ready six weeks before a window opens.
- Use the subarea information on the report to aim the retake, but remember it is 50% written. If the written section is where you lost the part, more content study will not fix it — timed rehearsal against the three criteria will.
The last thing to remember
Most written responses land at a 2 or a 3, and the difference is almost never eloquence. It is
answering every part of the charge, hitting the counts it asks for, applying district-level knowledge
accurately, and supporting each claim with an example from the material or with reasoning you actually spell
out. When you are unsure what a scenario wants: gather the information before you act, work through the building
leaders rather than around them, build capacity instead of solving it yourself, address the system rather than the
individual, and tie it back to student learning across the district.