Ask a hundred people how to pass the BCBA exam and you’ll hear the same advice a hundred times: read Cooper, more hours, more flashcards, more practice questions.

But what if you could pass in half (or even a quarter) of that study time?

It comes down to one habit. I’ll lay it out for you, but first let’s go back to the basics and acknowledge this truth:

Reinforcement (i.e. learning) requires a response and feedback!

Hearing or reading information is NOT the same as learning!

That’s the whole case for studying smarter- keeping yourself actively responding while you study to ensure that learning actually occurs.

But once you’re responding, there’s one habit that multiplies the value of every single response. The key?

RATIONALES

Providing answers is step one for learning to occur. Providing rationales is what’s going to crank up the potency of those learning opportunities!

When you provide a rationale, 2 things happen:

1. You connect a reason to why you chose an answer
2. You increase the amount of effort you put into your answer

Connecting the reason guides you towards future correct responding in similar situations (like questions with the same concepts).

Increasing the response effort ups the stakes of how reinforcing or punishing the answer is, modifying how quickly you learn things the right way.

So whether you get it right or wrong, YOU STILL WIN!!

When you’re correct, the larger investment of effort further strengthens your correct connection between the relevant details and the answer compared to plain answering.

When you’re incorrect, the rationale strengthens the punishment experienced, resulting in a larger decreasing effect on making the incorrect relation.

Get it right: the correct relation gets stronger. Get it wrong: the incorrect relation gets weaker. There is no losing rep!

But Niiiick, it’s hard!!

You know what else is hard?

Failing this test 12 times.

You get to choose whether to go down the more difficult studying road or the more difficult life road.

And from what I’ve seen, the studying road is waaaaay more chill!

So I challenge YOU!!

Every (yes, EVERY) question that you answer from now on, provide a rationale about why you chose your answer.

Instead of just answering “C,” take a few seconds to add one sentence: “It’s C because the behavior increased and the consequence added something.” That’s it. That’s a rationale!

And I promise you, these learning opportunities will stack up quickly and start feeling easy!

Once the habit is in place, you’re ready for the next blog post- How to Write Stronger Rationales, where I will break down exactly how to write quality rationales and walk through a full exam question step by step.

With love and nerdiness 💜🤘🤓

Nick