My 8-week AMA study schedule (free resources only)

What do you think about condensing this to 4-5 weeks if I can do 2-3 hours per day? I have a test date that's sooner than I'd like and trying to figure out if I can make it work.

Great breakdown. One thing I'd add to Week 1: look at the score breakdown from your baseline practice test — not just the overall score. Most AMA exams are weighted by domain, and knowing which domains carry more weight changes how you allocate study time.

The Anki flashcard tip is something more people need to hear. I have a AMA deck with about 200 cards covering all the key terms and formulas. Doing 20 cards/day during my lunch break added up faster than I expected.

This is gold. Saving and sharing with my study group. The "stop studying 24 hours before" advice is underrated — I bombed an exam once because I crammed until midnight and couldn't think straight in the morning.

Failed my first attempt in March and honestly the hardest part was figuring out what actually went wrong. I thought I knew the content — I'd read through everything, made flashcards, felt pretty solid going in. But the exam doesn't really test whether you memorized definitions. It tests whether you can apply them in messy, realistic scenarios where two answers look almost equally right. That distinction completely caught me off guard.

What I changed for round two: I stopped treating the content outline as a reading list and started using it as a diagnostic tool. After every practice session I'd map my wrong answers back to which domain they came from — turns out I was weak in marketing metrics and customer lifetime value calculations, not the brand strategy stuff I'd been obsessing over. I also did a lot more timed ama practice test sessions in the final two weeks instead of passive review. Being comfortable with the pacing made a huge difference on test day.

One thing I wish someone had told me: the scenario-based questions often hinge on one word. "Best" vs. "most likely" vs. "first step" — they're asking different things and the answer changes. Slowing down to actually parse what's being asked saved me probably 4-5 questions on my second attempt. Your schedule looks solid. Just make sure the back half is heavy on application, not more content review.