How many weeks did you actually study for CAIA? Be honest

Quick data point: I spent 5 weeks studying, 1-2 hours a day, and passed with a 73%.

The section on CAIA 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.

Went through this exact question when I was prepping. The CAIA material on "CAIA" is actually not as bad as it looks — once it clicks it clicks.

What helped me was finding one resource that explained it from first principles instead of just giving me the "right answer." Made a huge difference on the scenario-based questions.

Also: don't underestimate the importance of reviewing your wrong answers more than your right ones. I learned more from 20 wrong answers than 200 correct ones.

5 weeks at an hour or two a night is plenty if you use it right — I did basically the same schedule and passed last month. So whoever told you that earlier in the thread is correct, don't spiral over it. The thing nobody warns you about though is how much the exam leans on the calculation-style questions. Total loss thresholds, ACV minus betterment, comparative negligence splits where you're figuring out who pays what percentage. The straight definition stuff (subrogation, salvage, first vs third party) I knew cold from work, but the math word problems are where people actually lose points.

The one detail that flipped it for me: I stopped just re-reading the material around week 3 and switched to doing question sets every single night instead. Reading felt productive but it wasn't sticking. Grinding a caia practice test over and over until I recognized the question patterns did way more than another pass through the guide. By the end I could tell what they were asking before I finished reading the stem.

If you've got 5 weeks, I'd honestly spend the first two on content and the last three almost entirely on practice questions, reviewing every wrong answer until you know why it's wrong. Don't memorize specific dollar figures either — your state's total loss formula and the difference between ACV and replacement cost matter way more than any one number.

Just passed mine last month with almost exactly your timeline — I think I had 6 weeks and was doing maybe 90 minutes a night after work. Totally doable, but you have to be strategic about it. The thing that actually moved the needle for me was drilling the liability coverage scenarios obsessively. A lot of the exam questions aren't straightforward "define this term" stuff — they throw you into a situation where you have to figure out whether a claim is covered, by whom, and under what conditions. If you're fuzzy on subrogation and how it interacts with uninsured motorist coverage, that's where I'd spend a serious chunk of your remaining time.

The other thing I did in week four was stop reading and start testing. I'd been going through study materials pretty linearly, which felt productive but wasn't actually building the recall speed I needed. Switched to timed practice sets and my scores jumped almost immediately. The caia practice test questions I was using were close enough to the real format that by test day the question style felt familiar, which took a lot of anxiety out of it.

Five weeks is tight but not unrealistic if you're consistent. The people who fail on that timeline usually ran out of time to review their weak spots — so maybe track which topic areas are killing you by week three and ruthlessly cut the stuff you already know cold.