Study planner

Your exam date, turned into a week-by-week plan.

Set your exam date and the days you can study. The planner puts all 63 lessons in the 16-week plan's order, assessment first, adds a practice session every week, then timed practice, the full-length simulations and a taper. Send it to your calendar or print it.

Study days
until exam day
study days
lessons in the plan
hours in all, about
How the plan runs
Test-day checklist

The calendar file works with Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook. Your settings are saved in this browser.

Aligned to the current NCE blueprint. Valid for exams through June 30, 2027. Minutes are estimates: lesson reading time plus about ten minutes for the video overview and the lesson's questions. Your own pace decides the rest.

How the planner builds your plan

The planner takes four things from you: your exam date, the day you want to start, the days of the week you can study, and roughly how long a study day is. From those it lays out every study day between now and the exam, dated, with the lesson or task for that day and an estimate of the minutes it takes.

  1. Lessons first, in the plan's order. All 63 NCE course lessons are spread across the lesson weeks in the same order as the printable 16-week plan: assessment first, then counseling skills and group work, ethics, areas of clinical focus, and treatment planning with the core counseling attributes. If you check "Leave out lessons I have already completed", finished lessons drop out and the rest spread over the time you have.
  2. Practice every week. Each week includes a practice session, so retrieval starts in week one instead of after the reading is done.
  3. Timed practice and the full-length forms. The last weeks move to timed practice and the two full-length simulations, never two in the same week, with the last one at least seven days before the exam.
  4. A taper. The final days are light review, not new material.

The dates line up with the site's printed plans. An exam sixteen weeks out follows the shape of the printable 16-week plan: about 20 minutes a day plus one longer weekend block, Form A at the end of week 12, Form B in week 15, and a taper at the end. Twelve weeks gives the compressed version, which needs about 30 minutes a day. Eight weeks follows the eight-week plan on the blog.

A worked example. You test in sixteen weeks and can study about 20 minutes on weekdays, with more time on Saturday. Enter the exam date, leave Monday through Saturday on and Sunday off (the default), and set about 20 minutes. Keep Saturday on because the planner puts the longer timed sets and the full-length simulations on weekend study days. Read the totals at the top before anything else. If the hours look short for the lessons you still have, add a study day rather than squeezing the taper. Then add the plan to your calendar with the .ics file, which works with Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook, or print it.

Your settings stay in this browser, so you can come back and adjust the plan when a week goes sideways. If your exam falls on or after July 1, 2027, read what is changing first: this plan follows the current exam. The test-day checklist covers the administrative steps the plan does not.