How many weeks did you actually need for the CRU? Sharing my plan

Quick update since this thread is basically my exact situation, two kids and the 6-9pm window. I just took my third full practice test last night and hit an 84, which is the first time I've broken into the 80s. The first one I took I got a 61 and honestly wanted to throw my laptop. What changed for me wasn't more hours, it was actually reviewing the ones I got wrong instead of just chasing the score. I read the explanation, wrote down why I missed it, then came back to that topic two days later. Boring but it works.

I'm planning to sit the real thing a week from Saturday, so right at that five week mark you mentioned. I've got two more practice tests left and I'm saving one for the Tuesday before so it's fresh but not so close that I panic over it. If you're working full time don't beat yourself up about the nights you only get an hour in. I had plenty of those and it still came together. Good luck, you've got this.

Five weeks sounds about right for your situation, honestly. I gave myself six because the products and guidelines section absolutely wrecked me at first — I kept mixing up conforming vs. non-conforming loan limits, and the whole ATR/QM stuff felt like alphabet soup until like week three. What finally made it click was drilling questions instead of just rereading the manual. I leaned on this set a ton: cru residential mortgage products & guidelines. The way it forced me to actually pick between an FHA and a VA scenario, or figure out which disclosure timeline applied, exposed the gaps way faster than my notes did.

My weak spot ended up being the seasoning and underwriting overlay questions, and the only reason I caught it was because I'd get the same category wrong over and over. So I'd suggest building in a buffer week just for whatever your problem area turns out to be — you won't know what it is until you're a couple weeks in. With the 6-9pm window and kids, I found doing 20-25 questions a night and then reviewing the misses the next morning during coffee worked better than cramming a giant block on the weekend. Quality over volume, especially when you're fried.

One thing I'd add to your plan: don't underestimate how much the guidelines portion overlaps with the products portion on the actual test. They're not really separate buckets. Once I started studying them together instead of as two chapters, my practice scores jumped maybe ten points.

Okay this is exactly the post I needed to see tonight. I'm in week 3 of my own run and the 6-9 window is real — by the time the kids are down my brain is basically oatmeal, so I feel the decompressing thing already and I haven't even sat the exam yet. Five weeks part-time actually tracks with what I'm pacing toward, so it's good to hear that wasn't insane.

Quick question while it's fresh for you though — what ended up being the part that actually ate your time? For me it's the situational/scenario questions, not the straight recall stuff. The definitions I can hammer with flashcards, but the "given this situation, what's the correct action" ones are where I keep second-guessing between two answers that both look right. Did you drill those a specific way, or did it mostly just click once you'd seen enough of them? Trying to figure out if I should carve out a whole week just for those or if I'm overthinking it.

Passed mine almost three years back now, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt, but reading your schedule I'd say five weeks was plenty — the thing that actually moved my score wasn't the number of weeks, it was when I stopped re-reading the material and started doing full timed sets. Hindsight's brutal that way. I burned my first two weeks "studying" (read: highlighting things I already knew) and only really started learning once I was getting questions wrong and having to figure out why. The CRU isn't a recall exam. It's a "here's a messy scenario, pick the least-bad action" exam, and you can't highlight your way into that judgment.

One thing I'd tell past-me: protect your weekend blocks for the long practice sets and use the 6-9pm weeknights for reviewing the misses, not grinding new questions. Your brain at 8:45pm after work and bedtime routines is not in shape to absorb new material — mine sure wasn't. But it's fine for going back over a scenario you blew and articulating the reasoning out loud. That review-the-why habit is what made the application questions click for me, way more than volume did.

And honestly? Trust the decompression you're feeling right now. The CRU has that effect because so much of it is reasoning under a clock, and that's draining in a way a pure memorization test isn't. If you put in those five weeks the way it sounds like you did, you probably did better than you think. The people I've seen retake it almost always cut their timed practice short — they knew the content cold and still got rattled by the format. Don't be that person, sounds like you already aren't.