A study plan for the
New York real estate exam

Sit one cold, early

Before you revise anything, sit a full form under the clock. It will feel like a waste of a form and it is the most useful 90 minutes you will spend, because the subject breakdown afterward is the only map you have. Studying in syllabus order, from the top, is how people spend three weeks on material they already knew.

Work from the breakdown, not the total

A score of 58 out of 75 tells you nothing you can act on. Which subjects the seventeen came off does. Two candidates on the same total routinely have opposite problems, one losing marks thinly across every subject and the other losing eight of them in agency alone.

Use single sections between the full sittings

Any exam here can be sat one section at a time. That is the right way to use the weeks in between: a 10-question agency section takes twelve minutes and can be done on a weeknight, where a full form cannot.

Read the explanation on the ones you got right

On a rules exam a good half of correct answers are half-guesses between two plausible options. The explanation tells you which of the two you were actually reasoning about. If you were right for the wrong reason, the same question in a different form will catch you.

Save the last form for the last week

Three forms with no questions in common means the third one measures learning rather than recall, but only if you leave enough distance between them. A week before is close enough that the pacing is fresh and far enough that there is still time to fix something.

What a practice score can and cannot tell you

It can tell you which subjects are costing you marks and whether your pacing works. It cannot tell you whether New York would pass you, because New York does not publish the mark that separates a pass from a fail and does not give you a number afterward. Aim well clear of any figure you have been quoted.

The three forms share no questions, which is what makes the third sitting worth anything. They are on the real estate page, and ten questions are free first on the samples page.