FCICE common mistakes
FCICE · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Choosing a vocabulary answer because the word looks or sounds familiar, without checking whether it fits the sentence's meaning and formal register.
Candidates prepare from decontextualized word lists and rely on everyday conversational meanings rather than the precise legal or academic sense required.
What to do instead
Practice sentence-completion with court opinions, statutes, and formal expository prose; for every choice, state the collocation and register that justify it and reject near-synonyms that do not fit.
Answering reading-comprehension items from one remembered phrase instead of the passage's overall argument, and not returning to the text to verify each option.
Time pressure and the habit of reading for isolated facts lead candidates to trust memory over the printed passage.
What to do instead
Do timed passage sets, label each paragraph's function in the margin, and eliminate options by locating the exact lines that support or contradict them before marking an answer.
Selecting an English-looking cognate on Spanish vocabulary items (for example, using 'realizar' for 'realize' or 'actual' for 'current').
First-language interference makes the English-shaped word feel correct even when the Spanish term carries a different meaning.
What to do instead
Maintain a false-cognate log with contrastive sentence pairs, and review it by producing the correct Spanish term from an English prompt rather than only recognizing it.
Using the indicative or an infinitive where formal Spanish requires the subjunctive, or confusing ser/estar and prepositions in grammar items.
Everyday spoken Spanish and English transfer leave gaps in the formal grammar tested on the written phase.
What to do instead
Do targeted drills on subjunctive triggers, aspect, ser/estar, and prepositional verbs; keep an error log by category and re-test only the categories that recur.
Rendering a sight-translation passage word for word in source word order, producing calques and ungrammatical target syntax.
Candidates read linearly and translate each word as they go instead of comprehending the clause before voicing it.
What to do instead
Read the whole sentence silently before speaking, chunk by meaning units, maintain a brief look-ahead, and drill target-language syntax with parallel legal texts.
Skipping, explaining, or paraphrasing unfamiliar terms in sight translation instead of rendering them faithfully.
Panic at an unknown term and the mistaken belief that an explanation is acceptable leads to omissions and additions.
What to do instead
Build a bilingual glossary of recurring legal and medical terms, use established equivalents, and practice completeness checks by comparing recordings against the source line by line.
Letting the simultaneous lag stretch to a full sentence or more and then summarizing instead of interpreting.
Fear of making an error and weak processing speed cause candidates to wait for meaning to 'settle' before speaking.
What to do instead
Do shadowing and progressive-lag drills, keep a one-to-two idea lag, and practice finishing each clause grammatically before the speaker moves on.
Dropping grammatical completions and self-monitoring during simultaneous work, leaving verb endings, agreement, and sentence endings unfinished.
Dividing attention between listening and speaking overloads working memory, so production quality collapses.
What to do instead
Use split-attention exercises such as interpreting while counting backward or tracking a written text, record every session, and review for incomplete clauses and agreement errors.
Taking consecutive notes as full words and sentences and then reading them back verbatim, losing the speaker's structure and connective logic.
Candidates have no note-taking system and try to transcribe rather than capture ideas and links.
What to do instead
Adopt a symbol-and-abbreviation system with vertical layout and margin links; practice reconstructing the source from notes without reading them as a script.
Altering or omitting numbers, dates, and proper names in consecutive interpretation because the notes capture gist but not exact figures.
Numbers are noted casually and are not rehearsed as a distinct skill, so they are the first elements lost under memory load.
What to do instead
Run dedicated number, date, and name drills in both directions, use a consistent digit notation, and always read back figures from notes before delivering the segment.