CSET Multiple Subjects study guide
CSET Multiple Subjects · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
CSET: Multiple Subjects is one of the California Subject Examinations for Teachers (CSET) assessments listed on the California Educator Credentialing Examinations website, the program site that also covers CalAPA, CalTPA, CBEST, CPACE, CTEL, NES, and WEST. Candidates working toward a Multiple Subject teaching credential take it to demonstrate subject-matter competence, and the site selects it from a list that includes the other CSET options such as Art, Music, Physical Education, Science, Social Science, and the world-language tests. The exam is organized as Subtest I, Subtest II, and Subtest III. Versions change: the site announced that the redeveloped Multiple Subjects Subtest II produced results in November 2017, and that the version of Subtest III identified as test code 103 was discontinued effective August 1, 2022, replaced by a redeveloped version administered from that date. The CSET Multiple Subjects study guide has 3 sections and about 1,665 words.
01Subtest I: Reading, Language, and Literature; History and Social Science
Candidates need a firm grasp of the reading rope: phonemic awareness (oral manipulation of sounds), phonics (sound-spelling correspondences), fluency (accuracy, rate, prosody), vocabulary, and comprehension. Know the alphabetic principle, common syllable types, and decoding patterns (CVC, CVCe, vowel teams, r-controlled).
551 words, about 3 min02Subtest III: Physical Education; Human Development; Visual and Performing Arts
Scientific inquiry: observation versus inference, hypothesis, controlled variables, repeated trials, data versus conclusion, and theory versus law. Physical science: properties of matter, states, density, atoms, mixtures and compounds, energy forms and transfer, forces and motion, simple machines, electricity and magnetism, and waves.
909 words, about 5 min03Mathematics
Numbers and operations (place value, fractions, decimals, percents, integers, order of operations), proportional reasoning, expressions and equations, functions and patterns, geometry (angles, polygons, circles, transformations, the Pythagorean theorem), measurement and unit conversion, and statistics and probability (central tendency, spread, simple probability). Expect word problems that require choosing an operation rather than just computing.
205 words, about 1 min