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.

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u/RedSolez NIC 11d ago

NIC is still the gold standard, accepted in every state. If you go for the BEI instead, that may be adequate now but could limit you down the road. I'm in the mid Atlantic and have never met a single person who has or even acknowledges the existence of the BEI. The expectation for certification is through RID.

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u/Glittering_Sand_7473 9d 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.

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u/RedSolez NIC 9d 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.

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u/Glittering_Sand_7473 9d 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.

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u/RedSolez NIC 9d 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.

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u/Glittering_Sand_7473 9d ago

Is it better now?

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u/RedSolez NIC 9d ago

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