(This post/document is for all the moms and dads out there that are trying to figure out if studying for a major exam is something that they should devote time to when they have little ones at home).
I am a mom to a 4.5 year old and in February I had our second daughter. After being home for a month on maternity leave I was bouncing around the idea that it could be the perfect time to study for the exam; I had an infant that slept the majority of the day and my oldest was in daycare until 4. At the end of March I started looking into the Pass The Big ABA Exam 5-Week course. I already had purchased the manual but didn’t know where to start my studying. There was so much information and I was overwhelmed with it all. $450 was a lot of money to spend for the course but I needed the structure and someone to tell me what to study and when. And my husband said that the course would pay for itself if I passed. That being said, here is what I did:
1. I was a behavior specialist in a school district so I already was familiar with principals of behavior and was able to apply the skills on the task list to my everyday job/life. That part was huge. If I didn’t understand how to do something I would message an admin of the ABA Study group and ask. I remember messaging Nick to find out if I was doing the math right to calculate the IRT for a DRO procedure…and I wasn’t. Making the mistake and figuring out where I went wrong helped create salience for me.
2. Like I said, I decided to sign up for the PTB 5-week course. I did this because I already had the manual but it was overwhelming and I really didn’t know how to break up and plan my studying. I liked that the course gave me a schedule and had a “test” each week that really motivated me to study. The $450 was a shocker but my husband said it was worth it if it helped me pass. I ended up liking the structure that the course provided me and I felt that the exams at the end of each week were beneficial. The part I wasn’t a fan of was that on my Saturdays for 5 weeks I had to spend 3-4 hours listening to them go over the exams. The only thing I got from that time was the answers and I didn’t think that it needed to take so long. Kind of a waste of my time that I could have been really studying. During the Saturdays my husband took the kids to his parent’s house and hung out there so that I could have the house to myself. There were one or two Saturdays that he was out of town and so I had the youngest with me. The nice thing about zooms in general is that you can mute yourself and turn the video off so I was able to nurse the baby or do other things without people knowing. At the end of the PTB manual there is a section that lists out all of the acronyms. I created a document that let me list out all the acronyms myself. I did this daily. If you have purchased the PTB manual I would be happy to share the document that I created…If you do not have the manual, it won’t help you because the document does not have the answers…that’s what the manual is for.
What I would do different: I would take all of the pretest/posttest and weekly exams and make copies of it all. I would also go through the PTB manual and make copies of all of the section posttests. That way I could do the tests over again closer to my actual exam and use as practice to see if I could score higher than the first time. I also liked to go through and keep using the section quizzes to keep my knowledge up. It would have helped to have something to write it all down on.
3. I hung up flash cards all over the house. They were in my bathroom in front of the toilet and all over my mirror and bathroom door. I also put some in the kitchen, all over the refrigerator and even put one at the coffee maker that I had to do before I made my morning coffee. I only hung the flash cards that had me list things and were the acronyms (Name the 7 types of compound schedules etc.). The rest of the cards I used as flash cards. I also learned the “list/acronym” cards in chunks and not all at once. If you ordered the PTB manual, in the back of the book it has a list of all the acronyms at the back listed per section. With the syllabus that PTB gave, I would make sure I had flash cards for all the important vocab words as well as all the acronyms completed. I would use the flash cards to go through daily and the acronyms I hung all over the place. When I learned an acronym it would then be put into the flash card rotation. The next week when we were studying new sections, the old acronyms would come down (I had already memorized them) and the new ones went up. I did this all the way to the end of the 5 weeks. To help with my memorization I hung up the acronym card on the wall and the answers were on the back. But when I was first learning, I didn’t want to be constantly be flipping the cards over from the wall to read the answers, so I put the answers on a post-it. When I mastered those, I might replace that post-it with another post it with just the acronym and no answers with the acronym (EX: BATCAGE) then when I mastered the acronym and could also say what the acronym stood for then the whole post-it came off.
4. Zoom sessions- This was HUGE and I cannot stress this enough. I first joined Nick’s zoom sessions and those were an eye opener. I dreaded them because I didn’t like being put on the spot. I learned that the more and more I pushed myself the more “natural” it became (good behavior speak, I know). The zoom sessions forced me to use the concepts that I was learning and apply them to everyday situations. We were able to talk out concepts and Nick gave fabulous examples that helped me remember the terms. Again, salience. I joined EVERY session that I could.
5. Go Rouge. What I found was that even though I loved the zoom sessions, I felt that we were covering some of the same concepts and I needed to go through other parts of the task-list. You can also tell when doing the zooms what other people are on your same level and what people are still learning the basic concepts. Find people in the ABA Study group that are on the same level with you. Our group had 9 people. We did “everything” together. We went through the task list over and over, read Baily and Burch together, did sample test questions, went through real life scenarios, did every mock exam we could get our hands on….pretty much they were the last people I talked to before going to bed and the first people I talked to in the mornings. Since we “went rogue” there hasn’t been a day that we haven’t talked to each other. We also shared everything with one another. We created a google drive folder that we were able to share all of our documents. It was a “one for all and all for one” mentality.
6. Mock Exams. Our group did about every single mock exam that is on the market. We would take the mock independently and then score our answers. Then in the zoom session we would go through and whatever anyone got wrong we would go through the answer and talk it out. Some questions were as simple as people missing the NOT in the question. We would learn each persons “weakness” and be able to say to them things like, “Remember, you seem to miss the NOT in the questions. Read a little slower.” Having someone point out our mistakes in a constructive way was key. Our group did one of the mock exams and didn’t agree with the answers that were given. So we contacted the author of the mock exam and we invited him to zoom with us so that he could walk us through his reasoning behind the answers. That was one of my favorites because we got to sit in a private zoom with the author of the mock and talk behaviorally with each other. It turned out that one of the questions on the mock that we discussed was actually on my exam and because of that zoom session I knew the answer.
7. When did I study? Remember I had a 1 month old. I would study whenever she was sleeping (unless I really needed a nap too) and I would also study when she was awake. There is honestly so much time that you can talk to a baby…so I studied. I would even read to her parts of the manual and the back of the flash cards. I explained concepts to her and talked her through scenarios. We would listen to the PTB lectures while I folded clothes and did other things around the house. I did all my studying while my oldest was at school because when she got home I had to focus on her. After a set amount of time studying each day I would allow myself one episode of Game of Thrones. My goal was always 3-4 hours a day of studying by myself. In the evenings when my husband got home I was either on Nicks, Ryan, or Celia’s zoom session or I was with my Rogue group. I would be fixing dinner for my family and participating in a zoom at the same time. The zooms would go until 9:00 at night (central time zone). I would get my 1 month old to bed which meant me turning on sound and video so that I could nurse her. My husband was single parenting my oldest. I kept joking that if we were still married by the end of this that we were lucky. It is hard work and I made sure to devote as much time as I could to studying and my husband understood that. I had to get over the “mom guilt” because if I devoted all the time now, it meant that I wasn’t having to do it again later down the road. It also meant that I could be a better mom and really this would be just a blip in my 4 year olds memory and my youngest would even know that her mom was studying day and night for an exam. During late night feedings I would go through and answer all of the newly posted study questions on the ABA Study group’s page. If there we no new questions then I would do the Quizlet flash cards that Nick created from Cooper. There were also times that my husband’s family would go out to dinner and I would look at it as times that I could stay home and study by myself. I skipped many family events to study but I knew that it would pay off. The time to myself was necessary for those crucial zoom sessions.
Make sure to: Make sure to reinforce those in your life that are helping you. My husband did SO much for me and when I say he single parented I really mean it. I bought him a massage (even though I was the one that really needed it) and made sure to get some of his favorite snacks and ice cream. And I thanked him All. The. Time. And I made sure to thank him in front of our children. I wanted our oldest to know that her dad was sacrificing something and I wanted her to hear how selfless he was being.
In the end all 9 of us in the Rogue group passed the exam. When I found out, the first people to know were my study group. They were my family in all of this and still are even after the results have come out.
Doing it different: If I were to have to go through the studying process again there are a few things I would do differently. I don’t think I would buy the 5-week PTB course. The ABA Study groups offers so much and offers so much more for this testing cycle (August) then it did for the previous test takers (even though it was kick ass then). Sarah, one of the admins and also one of the Rogue Study group members, it leading a course that goes over the task list. I would still use the PTB manual but also use the materials that Sarah has created and posted in the group. I believe there is another person that took the exam and passed that is creating a study structure. All this being said, you do not have to spend $450+ on courses to pass. Just utilize the concepts that the 5-week courses use and apply them to your studying.
We had members in our Rogue Group that took the 5-week course and some that didn’t…and we all still passed. 3 out of the 9 of us have young children and so we were able to relate with one another and the struggles in balancing studying during nap times and feedings. Studying when you have children is HARD but you can do it and you can pass. This is just the stuff that helped me pass and I am sure that there are others out there that have different studying experiences that can give a different perspective on things. But if you are trying to decide if you should start studying…the answer is yes. You can do it. When you pass, you will look back on it and wonder how you survived that month or two of hard core studying. But the key is that you did survive…and so did everyone else around you!