ABA board exam — how long did you study and what did you prioritize?

Twelve weeks at 1.5 hours daily should be enough. I did ten weeks at two hours and scored an 84%. Katz is good for depth but it's dense — use it for your weak domains and don't try to read the whole thing cover to cover or you'll run out of time.

The hearing aid section includes coding and reimbursement questions that surprised me. Make sure you're not just prepping the clinical side — the business and billing knowledge is tested more than the content outline implies.

It's a fixed-format exam, not adaptive. You get 200 questions and four hours. Most people finish with time to spare but I'd recommend marking and reviewing flagged questions rather than rushing — I changed about eight answers on review and six of those changes were correct.

The vestibular section trips up a lot of clinicians who've been in specialized practices. I'd weight your prep based on your clinical gaps, not the official blueprint percentages. If you haven't done much vestibular work recently, give it 25% of your time even if it's only 12% of the exam.

Update for anyone following this thread: I just hit 74% on a practice set last night and honestly I wasn't expecting that. I've been using a mix of resources but what really helped me click on the diagnostic side was working through the free aba audiologic assessment diagnosis questions because they're worded the way the real exam tends to phrase things. Still shaky on vestibular stuff but everything else feels a lot more solid than it did two months ago.

I'm planning to sit in late September. If you're in the same boat just start doing practice questions even if you don't feel ready, that's what finally got me moving.

I felt exactly the same way before I started studying, and honestly the eight content areas had me convinced I'd never be ready. What actually helped me was stopping trying to cover everything equally and just leaning hard into diagnostic audiology first. I found free aba audiologic assessment diagnosis practice questions and drilled them until the patterns clicked. Once that section felt solid the rest of the exam started making more sense because so much of it connects back to assessment fundamentals.

I studied about three months, maybe an hour and a half most weekdays. It wasn't glamorous but it worked. Don't let the content outline psych you out, you probably know more than you think you do from your clinical hours.