First of all, check the study plan you made when you first started this project. You need to be brutally honest with yourself. Was your plan realistic, or were you ‘optimistic’ about yourself, your time, and your study habits, when you put it together? If you were optimistic, you need to re-visit your plan using your recent experience as a yard stick to modify your plan. More than anything else, it is important to be honest with yourself.

Okay, you’ve re-evaluated your study plan and you can still get it done, but you want to take what steps you can to improve your chances of passing. While this has been fun, it’s not so much fun you want to do it several more times. At the outset, I advised you to work first on the chapters which you knew little about. Now, it’s getting down to crunch time and that calls for a modification to your study plan.

According to the AFP website, there is a breakdown of the number of questions per chapter. Approximately 94 questions (63%) on the test are taken from 8 chapters of the BOK, not counting the 20 unscored questions. If you have determined that there is still time for you to study the material in time for the test, I would suggest focusing on those chapters with the highest question counts and working to the chapters with the lowest question counts. Don’t misunderstand, all of the information is important and you never know which part will be more important to you until you’re asked, but this is a strategy to help you pass the test first. Once you have accomplished that, you can keep the BOK on your desk as a reference book. I certainly do!

- Fred Butterfield, CTP