I talked with a recruiter last month who was staffing paraprofessional roles in two states at once, one just over the Georgia line. She asked for "the para test score" for both postings, as if it were one number on one exam. In Georgia it isn't. Georgia qualifies paraprofessionals on the GACE Paraprofessional Assessment, test code 177, a program run by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission. It has nothing to do with Praxis ParaPathways or ParaPro, the two exams most of this blog discusses.
That single fact changes how a recruiter should talk about the role, how a candidate should prepare, and what a district on either side of a state line needs to tell new hires.
What is the GACE Paraprofessional Assessment?
The GACE 177 is a 90-question, selected-response exam, computer delivered, with 2.5 hours of testing time inside a 3 hour appointment. ETS administers it for the Georgia Professional Standards Commission. The passing score is 250, and ETS describes it as an entry level assessment with no tiered passing standards, so there is one bar, not a range of qualification levels to explain to a hiring committee.
The test covers three roughly equal subareas: reading, at 34 percent of the exam, mathematics at 33 percent, and writing at 33 percent. The reading subarea asks candidates to interpret text, graphs, charts and tables drawn from real classroom situations. The math subarea covers place value, fractions, percentages and basic exponents as a para would actually use them to assist a teacher, and it does not permit a calculator. The writing subarea covers grammar, usage and mechanics, then moves into helping a student plan, draft, revise and edit their own writing.
One detail worth flagging to anyone studying for it: ETS says the math questions deliberately avoid advanced math vocabulary. The content is applied, not academic. A candidate who has not taken a math class in years is being tested on recall of classroom-level procedures, not on terminology.
Why does naming the exam correctly matter?
Because "the para test" is not one thing. Twenty four states publish a Praxis ParaPathways cut score. Sixteen more still qualify paras on ParaPro with no end date in sight. Five states, including Florida and Texas, leave the number to each district. And a handful of states run something else entirely: New York uses NES 519 through NYSTCE, Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina use ACT WorkKeys, Kentucky runs its own KPA, and Iowa requires no exam at all. Georgia belongs in that last group of states running their own thing. Roughly half the country is not sitting the same test as the state next to it, and a recruiter who assumes otherwise will promise a candidate the wrong prep, the wrong timeline, or both.
For a district that hires across a state line, or a staffing agency working both sides of one, that is not a detail. It is the first question to get right before a candidate is told anything about how to prepare.
Does Georgia requiring the GACE mean every district there has to test?
Naming the exam a state uses is not the same as saying every district must give it. Whether a candidate has to sit a qualifying exam at all, and which route counts, is still a decision your own district or employer makes inside whatever the state allows. I have written about that distinction in more depth here, and it holds in Georgia the same as anywhere else. The GACE is the instrument the state has set up. Whether your posting requires it, and for which roles, is still yours to decide and yours to document.
What should a recruiter actually tell a Georgia candidate?
Tell them the real name of the test. A candidate who searches "para exam Georgia" and lands on material built for Praxis ParaPathways is reading about a different test, with different content weights and a different passing standard. That mismatch costs a candidate study time on the wrong material, and it costs you a candidate who shows up underprepared through no fault of their own.
Tell them the shape of it too. Ninety questions, no calculator on the math section, three subareas weighted close to evenly. A candidate who expects a heavily reading-weighted exam, which is how Praxis ParaPathways is built, will not budget their study time correctly for a test that splits reading, math and writing almost equally.
What does this mean for a multi-state employer?
If you recruit across Georgia and even one neighboring state, build your onboarding material to ask "which exam does this candidate actually need" before you hand anyone a study guide. Our paraprofessional requirements page tracks what each state and jurisdiction actually requires, sourced from each program's own published materials rather than a generic search result, so you can check Georgia against wherever else you hire before assuming the two postings share a test.
Half the value of knowing your state's actual requirement is not preparing candidates correctly, though that matters. It is not promising a candidate the wrong thing in the first place. If you want help sorting out exactly which exam applies to a role you are filling, across Georgia or any other state, get in touch and we can work through it together.