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This paper attempts to bring attention to contributions that text analysis may provide for improving students’ performance in an accreditation test. The paper takes an example of the Australian interpreting accreditation system, one of the exemplary accreditation institutions in the world (Hale et al., 2012: 10). The Australian case may be of use to the Korean interpreting circles that have had an increased interest in recent years in adopting its own interpreting accreditation system (e.g. Park 2016). Of all the different contributors that help determine success in the test, including language ability and cognitive efficiency, text analysis seems to also have a significant role to play in increasing students’ chance of success in the test. As a theoretical framework, this paper uses Systemic Functional Linguistics’ method of thematic development and grammatical metaphor. The main data includes two English source texts and eight students’ consecutive interpreting of those texts. The students’ interpreting was drawn from recordings and notes taken during their accreditation exams. The findings of the analysis show that, while successful test-takers handled zig-zag patterns and grammatical metaphors without serious issues, unsuccessful students missed, deleted and/or mistranslated the aforementioned elements that affected the comprehensive interpretation.