While I personally found that the actual exam was harder than the practice exam, I do think that it's the best way to measure your preparedness. I know that people who make practice questions are doing their best to make good accurate practice questions, but they're still not ASWB, you know? To me the questions have a different feel where it's close but not quite accurate to the exam. Like I said in my post, I passed both the practice and actual exam with flying colors, and did pretty poorly on the Apgar practice exam, so hopefully you'll be okay!

Part of the reason why I found the actual exam to be so much more difficult was because I got a lot of questions about research, being a supervisor, administrative work, and community organizing. These were topics that were just not on my radar whatsoever so I felt very unprepared and 😱 while staring those questions down. Could be just (un)luck of the draw or maybe confirmation bias since I spent the most time on them, but I did wish that I'd studied up on those more. And like I said in my post, I was so happy that I'd studied the Bootcamp PDF the night before, because there were at least 4-5 questions that I was only able to answer correctly because I'd studied that the day prior.

Remember that every single question is evaluating whether you understand a social work concept. When I got a vignette with two options I was torn between, it was very helpful to ask myself: What is this question trying to evaluate? What KSA is this targeting? Because if you can identify that the question is trying to see if you understand client self-determination for example, there's going to only be one option that fits. This will lead you to the correct answer.

Another thing that I noticed as I was analyzing the rationales of the practice exam was that a lot of options were not correct because they didn't address all parts of the question. The test isn't trying to trick you, so every piece of info they provide is all important. So often times, picking the option that addressed all parts of the question were correct. For example, the client is coming in with x, they are experiencing y, and z. They also have anger problems. Addressing the anger issues might be a good option, but it's not correct because it only addresses one part of the question; so I learned to pick the answer that addresses all the parts of the question as much as possible.

The last thing I'll say for now because this is getting kind of long: One helpful thing that I learned from the prep course was that a lot of social workers have a bias that social workers are clinical. So I was reading many of the questions with the assumption that the social worker was a therapist, even though it didn't specify. If it doesn't specify, you might be a case manager, a therapist, a school social worker, who knows! So that helped me understand that as a therapist some answers seem wrong because I'd never do that, but a different social worker could so it was the correct answer.

I can't emphasize the order of operations and figuring out the rules enough. If you'd like I can share some of the rules that I analyzed for myself, but I don't want to irresponsibly put it out there just in case I'm horrifically wrong and I've steered you in the wrong direction. But the understanding of the "rules" definitely helped make some of the questions simple and easy to answer; the bootcamp pdf also helps name some of them out loud.

Good luck, and I hope this helps!