The need for highly qualified bilingual and English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers continues to rapidly increase. In this article, we share the results of a multi-year study that has aimed to determine what factors affect the performance of teacher candidates seeking bilingual education and ESL in a teacher preparation program in the Southwest. In this article, we focus on 89 teacher candidates' performance on the Core Subject (TExES 291) test, as it represents one of the most important testing attempts these teacher candidates must pass in order to be on track toward certification. For this manuscript we explored both internal (e.g., gender, age group, ethnicity) as well as external factors (e.g., good test taker) to determine the extent to which these had a role (or otherwise) in their test performance. While our data confirm previous studies findings regarding the impact of internal factors such as gender, age, marital status, among others, teacher preparation can help mitigate some barriers for ESL and bilingual certification.