Best free resources for SIOP prep — what's actually worth your time

Bookmarking this. I'm still in the early stages of SIOP prep and threads like this are way more useful than generic study guides. The specifics about study guide are particularly helpful — that's the section I've been avoiding.

Congrats on passing! Can I ask — how many questions did the actual exam have compared to what the practice tests simulate? I've seen different numbers online and want to calibrate my timing during practice.

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

Honestly the biggest thing that helped me wasn't grinding more questions, it was changing how I used the ones I had. Early on I just memorized which answer was correct and moved on. Bad idea. The SIOP stuff loves to put two answers that look almost identical, and if you only know "C is right" you'll still blow it when they reword the question. So after every practice test I'd go back through and force myself to explain why each wrong option was wrong. It's slower. It works.

For actually drilling that I leaned on the free siop assessment diagnosis 2 set because the explanations break down the distractors instead of just stamping the right letter. That's the part that's worth your time. If a resource doesn't tell you why the trap answers are traps, you're just memorizing and you'll forget it by exam day. Read the explanations even on the ones you got right, you'd be surprised how often you were right for the wrong reason.

I'm working full time so I had maybe an hour at night and not much else, and honestly the free practice tests were what kept me going. I'd do one short set after dinner, look at what I got wrong, then come back to it the next day. The siop assessment diagnosis 2 one was the section I kept bombing at first so I just ran it over and over until the questions stopped surprising me. Didn't need to block out whole weekends or anything.

My advice if you're busy like I was, don't try to cram. It wasn't the long study sessions that helped me, it was just being consistent with the small ones. Twenty minutes a day adds up faster than you'd think, and it's way easier to actually stick to.

Just passed mine last month and honestly the thing that clicked for me was drilling the applied scenarios, not just memorizing definitions. I kept getting tripped up on the diagnosis side until I found the siop assessment diagnosis 2 practice set — worked through it twice and the question style is really close to what you'll actually see. That's what made the difference for me.

Don't sleep on the research methods questions either. They're sneaky. I'd read a concept, think I had it, then get the practice question wrong because the wording was slightly different. If you're running low on time, focus your energy there and on diagnosis. Good luck everyone, it's passable if you're smart about it.

Honestly the approach that made the biggest difference for me was forcing myself to figure out why the wrong answers were wrong, not just why the right one was right. It sounds obvious but I didn't really do it until I was a few weeks in and my scores weren't moving. Once I started, things clicked way faster. The siop assessment diagnosis 2 practice set is great for this because the distractors are really well written — they're plausible enough that you have to actually think through the underlying principle to eliminate them.

The free stuff is genuinely underrated here. I wasted money on a prep book early on that wasn't nearly as useful as just grinding through free practice questions with that mindset. If a wrong answer trips you up, that's a gap worth digging into. It's slower at first but you're actually learning the material instead of pattern-matching your way to a score that doesn't hold.