CLEE prep for MFT licensure — hitting 68% on practice, need 75% to pass
I'm a Marriage and Family Therapist candidate in California working through the CLEE requirement as part of my licensure path. I've got the exam scheduled for 5 weeks from now and I'm consistently scoring 68–70% on practice questions. The passing threshold is 75% and I can't afford to fail — my supervision hours are done and this is the last box to check.
The law section is fine, honestly. I know the mandated reporting requirements, confidentiality exceptions, and scope of practice stuff cold from supervision. Where I keep losing points is the ethics scenarios — specifically the questions where two CAMFT code principles seem to be in conflict and you have to apply a hierarchy of considerations. Those question formats are tricky because they're not about recall, they're about judgment.
I've been studying about 1.5 hours per day focusing almost entirely on ethics case scenarios. I'm reading through the CAMFT and APA ethics codes and trying to internalize the reasoning rather than just memorizing rules. My practice scores have moved from 64% to 68% over 3 weeks, which is progress but not fast enough if I need another 7 points in 5 weeks.
Anyone who's passed CLEE recently — how heavily does the real exam lean on dual relationship and boundary questions specifically? That's where I'm getting burned on practice sets and I want to know if I should triple-down on that area or if it's more balanced than my prep materials suggest.
The ethics judgment questions are hard to study for with flashcards. What helped me was working through actual CAMFT ethics committee case summaries — seeing how the committee reasoned through real scenarios trained my intuition better than any practice question set.
Going from 64% to 68% in 3 weeks is solid momentum. I was at 69% three weeks out and scored 77% on the actual exam. The real test felt slightly more straightforward than some of the harder practice questions I'd been drilling.
Dual relationship questions were everywhere on my exam. It felt like a third of the ethics section was boundary scenarios of varying complexity. If that's your weak point, I'd prioritize it above everything else for the next 5 weeks.
The law section really is easier than people fear. If you're already strong there, shift almost all your remaining time to ethics. 1.5 hours on law per week is enough maintenance — put the other 8 hours into ethics case analysis.
I was stuck at 68% for weeks and the thing that finally moved the needle for me wasn't doing more questions, it was forcing myself to explain every wrong answer out loud before moving on. Not just "oh that's wrong" but actually saying why the other option fails — what rule it violates, what it would look like in a real session. It feels slow at first but you start recognizing patterns that just don't show up when you're grinding through questions on autopilot.
For mandated reporting specifically, that clicked for me when I stopped treating it as trivia and started asking "what's the harm if I apply this rule wrong?" That reframe made the exceptions actually stick. The clee mandated reporting 2 practice set has some tricky scenarios where the right answer isn't obvious and it's a good place to practice that wrong-answer analysis. Five weeks is enough time if you're deliberate about it. You've got this.