Time management during CAR exam — how fast are you supposed to go?

Appreciate everyone sharing their experience here. I'm 3 weeks out from my CAR exam date and feeling more confident after reading this. The consensus on study guide being the hardest section matches what I'm seeing in my practice scores — going to put extra time there this 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 CAR and felt sharper on the practice test questions than I expected. Don't underestimate recovery time.

The advice about understanding why wrong answers are wrong — not just memorizing right ones — is genuinely the best CAR advice in this thread. Rebuilt my prep around that and it made a real difference.

Great discussion. One thing nobody mentions: sleep the night before matters more than one more study session. Went in fully rested for my CAR and felt sharper than expected.

I just passed mine last month and honestly the thing that helped most wasn't speeding up, it was stopping second-guessing. I used to read a question, pick an answer, then talk myself out of it. That was killing my time. First instinct is almost always right, so I started trusting it and just moving.

Also worth drilling the dismantling and processing stuff specifically — I spent a lot of time on free automotive recycler vehicle dismantling processing questions because those were the ones I'd stall on mid-exam. Once those felt automatic, I had way more mental bandwidth for the tricky ones. You've got time to fix this before your real test, just don't waste it overthinking.

Just passed mine last month and honestly the thing that helped most was stopping myself from getting stuck. If I didn't know an answer in about 30 seconds I just flagged it and moved on. Sounds obvious but I wasn't actually doing that before — I'd sit there second-guessing myself and burning a minute on one question.

The other thing is the questions aren't evenly hard. You'll hit a stretch of easy ones and can move fast, then a few that need more thought. Don't let the slow questions set your pace for the whole test. Get through what you can confidently, then use whatever time's left to go back. That strategy alone is probably worth 5-6 questions for you.