Time management during ACE exam — how fast are you supposed to go?

Quick data point: I spent 7 weeks studying, 1-3 hours a day, and passed with a 79%.

The section on ACE exam took me the longest to feel confident about. Eventually I just drilled practice questions until I could answer them without hesitation.

What testing center did you end up booking? Some of them have much shorter wait times than others right now.

For anyone finding this thread later: the ACE is passable with consistent effort, even working full time. I studied 43 minutes a day for 12 weeks. The ace in photoshop workflow & file management kept me honest about where my gaps were instead of just drilling things I already knew.

What helped me most with practice test specifically: stop thinking about it as a topic to memorize and start thinking about the types of decisions it's asking you to make. Once I shifted to that frame, my ACE scores in that section jumped about 10 points within a week.

I passed mine about three months ago while working full-time, so I totally get the crunch feeling. Honestly the 61 seconds sounds scary but in practice a lot of questions go faster than that, especially if you've drilled specific tool sets. I'd spend a week just hammering the ones that always slowed me down — for me it was anything vector-related, so I did a ton of reps on free ace vector tools type and libraries style questions until they felt automatic. That way I was building up a time buffer on the easy stuff so I wasn't panicking at the end.

The other thing that actually helped was flagging and moving on without guilt. I used to sit on hard questions way too long because it felt wrong to skip them, but once I broke that habit my pacing improved a lot. If you've got 13 questions left with no time, you're probably spending 90+ seconds on the ones that feel uncertain — flag them, finish the rest, come back. It's not a perfect strategy but it beats leaving a whole block blank.

I had the same issue at first, and what helped me more than anything was stopping to understand why wrong answers are wrong instead of just drilling right ones. When you know why a distractor is wrong, you can eliminate it in seconds rather than second-guessing yourself. That alone cut my average time per question down a lot. The free ace vector tools type and libraries questions are a good example -- once I understood the actual logic behind how libraries and linked assets work, those questions went from 90 seconds to maybe 20.

For pacing, I'd say don't aim for 61 seconds flat on every question. Some you'll get in 10, some will legitimately need a minute. Flag anything that's eating time and move on -- that buffer from your fast questions is what saves you on the hard ones. It's counterintuitive but spending less time trying to force an answer often means you score better overall.

Still in the middle of studying for this one and your breakdown is actually stressing me out a little — 61 seconds per question sounds fine until you hit those multi-step workflow questions where they describe a scenario and ask which sequence of adjustments would get you to the right output. Those can eat 90 seconds before you've even decided on an answer.

Curious what category of questions was slowing you down most. Was it the technical stuff like blend modes and layer masking, or more the tool-selection and workflow efficiency questions? I've been drilling with an ace practice test and I notice I blow time on anything involving color correction workflows — too many "which adjustment layer does this best" scenarios where I second-guess myself halfway through.

Also wondering if you found any patterns in where your time went — like did you lose the 13 questions at the end gradually or did you hit a wall on a specific section and never recover?