Anyone else studying for CATS in the next month? Want to study together

What helped me most with isa certified arborist specifically: stop thinking about it as a topic to memorize and start thinking about the types of decisions it's asking you to make. Once I shifted to that frame, my CATS scores in that section jumped about 15 points within a week.

Great discussion here. One thing I'd add that hasn't come up: sleep the night before is genuinely more important than one more study session. I went in fully rested for my CATS and felt sharper on the isa certified arborist questions than I expected. Don't underestimate recovery time.

Quick update: just cleared 81% on my most recent CATS practice set using free arborist albuquerque pruning care. Sitting for the real thing in 4 weeks. Feeling cautiously optimistic.

Failed first attempt, came back to this thread. The consensus on cats practice test being the make-or-break area is right. Focusing almost exclusively on applied questions this time around.

Just passed mine three weeks ago and I was in the exact same boat, going through the ISA cert material and trying to patch up weak spots. The thing that actually moved the needle for me was tree biology. I kept treating it like background reading and bombing those questions, so I forced myself to sit down and really learn how water and nutrients move, how wounds compartmentalize, all of it. Once that clicked, a ton of the pruning and diagnosis questions basically answered themselves because I understood the why instead of memorizing.

If you're doing accountability check-ins, my one piece of advice is don't just quiz each other on definitions. Make the other person explain the reasoning out loud. That's where I found out what I only half knew. You've got plenty of time at 7 weeks, so I wouldn't stress. Just keep hammering the weak areas and you'll be fine.

Hey, count me in. I'm sitting mine in about 5 weeks so we're roughly on the same timeline. I just did a full run on the free arborist albuquerque urban forestry environmental care set last night and got a 78. Not amazing but it's way up from the low 60s I was scoring three weeks ago, so something's clicking. My weak spot is still the soil and root stuff, which I didn't think would trip me up but it absolutely does.

It'd help to compare notes with someone who's deep in the ISA material too. I'm planning to do timed sets every couple days from here on out and just keep hammering whatever I miss. What've you been scoring lately? If you want we could pick a section each week and both grind it, then swap where we got stuck. I learn a lot more when I have to explain why an answer's wrong than when I just read it.