Typical Prep vs Others: NBCOT

Studying for the NBCOT exam can feel like a lot. There are many resources to pick from, including NBCOT's own StudyPack, TherapyEd, AOTA Board Prep, and TrueLearn, and it is easy to end up paying for several of them.

Typical Prep was built to be your one-stop shop for passing the NBCOT exam. It offers a question bank of 1,900+ OT questions, the NBCOT Explained video course, the Occupational Therapy Essentials textbook, and the OT Essentials flashcard set, all organized around the same topics.

NBCOT changed the OTR exam on January 2, 2024. The clinical simulation test items were removed and replaced with scenario sets. Each scenario set gives you a client case followed by four questions, and each question asks you to choose three of six options. The OTR exam is now 180 items, and both the OTR and COTA exams follow content outlines based on NBCOT's 2022 practice analyses.

The COTA exam uses single-response multiple-choice items and independent multi-select items, each asking you to choose three of six options. Our questions are built around client scenarios, so you practice applying what you know to a client the way both exams ask you to.

The Typical Prep question bank has 1,900+ OT questions. Every question comes with an explanation of why the correct answer is right and why each wrong answer is wrong.

When you understand why an option is wrong, you can rule it out the next time it shows up in a different client scenario.

Many explanations include illustrations that break a hard topic into one clear picture. Visual summaries of conditions, assessments, and interventions make the material easier to remember, especially for visual learners.

Most NBCOT resources give you questions or a book. Typical Prep offers you both, plus a video course.

The NBCOT Explained video course has 100+ animated lessons and 32+ hours of content, with pre and post quizzes for every lesson. Watch the lesson on a topic first, then practice questions on it.

The Occupational Therapy Essentials textbook has 550+ pages of high-yield content written for the NBCOT exam, with tables, comparisons, and illustrations. Use it to review a topic after a missed question, or as your main study guide from start to finish.

Our adaptive learning mode looks at how you perform and chooses your next questions from the topics where you need the most work. You spend your time on weak areas instead of reviewing what you already know.

As you improve, the questions change with you, so your practice keeps pace with your progress.

The custom exam creator lets you build a practice set around exactly what you want to study. Choose the subject, the topic, the difficulty, and the number of questions, then start. You can also choose unused questions or only the questions you got wrong before.

Our questions are organized into five subjects (Evaluation and Assessment, Diagnoses and Conditions, Planning and Intervention Management, Interventions and Techniques, and Professional Practice) and 22 topics within them.

You do not need to build your own study plan. Enter your exam date, and the adaptive study calendar lays out a day-by-day schedule of lessons, quizzes, question practice, and flashcards. As you complete each day, the calendar adjusts to your progress and the time you have left.

The notebook lets you copy text and illustrations from the question bank into your own study guide. Make a page for each major topic, add your own notes, and organize them the way you think.

By test day, you will have a personal, illustrated review guide built from the questions you studied. The notebook syncs across your devices, so you can review on your phone or computer.

Typical Prep schedules review using spaced repetition, so a topic comes back after a gap instead of all at once. Research on learning supports this approach:

• In a review of 317 experiments, Cepeda and colleagues found that spreading study sessions out improved long-term recall compared with studying in one block.

• In Kornell's flashcard experiments with GRE-type word pairs, spaced study worked better than massed study for 90% of participants. After the first session, 72% of them believed massed study had worked better.

Massed study can feel more productive in the moment, so plan repeated review sessions with time between them.