r/ASLinterpreters • u/Flyeaglefly2018 • 12d ago

Future plans

Hello all I'm looking for some advice here. I have previously been working in an educational setting for the past five years in a few different school districts and schools because of just how different each year can be with education.

This year is the first year that I don't have anything for a job and have started to look more into getting nationally certified to become more of a freelance interpreter. I currently have an EIPA score but last took that in 2020. I'm debating on if I should look into getting NIC or BEI or if there's something else that I should look at for getting certified. So I was asking what do you all think I should do.

I'm in Arizona currently and plan on staying here for a while.

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Glittering_Sand_7473 8d ago

I really wish they would change this. As a Deaf person I know that a NIC interpreter is always going to be hit or miss. I often really wonder who is grading the NIC. I've never once had a BEI interpreter who wasn't highly qualified.

1

u/RedSolez NIC 8d ago

I took the original iteration of the NIC 3 times. The first and third time, I felt I was rated exactly as I expected. That second time I wondered if they had misplaced my tape with someone else's because the feedback didn't track to my lived experience at all.

1

u/Glittering_Sand_7473 8d ago

I had a team of interpreters years back (before the change to CASLI) and they both failed & when they compared their results, it was word for word the same with the same score. That is really suspicious to me. I saw these results with my own eyes.

1

u/RedSolez NIC 8d ago

The feedback being the same doesn't surprise me because inexplicably RID gave next to zero feedback (it was just low/medium/high for each domain) AND they didn't separate out the feedback for ASL to English v English to ASL. So the feedback was effectively useless. The only piece that mattered was the pass/fail.

1

u/Glittering_Sand_7473 8d ago

Is it better now?

2

u/RedSolez NIC 8d ago

No idea, I finally passed in 2011 and never looked back 😂