- Familiarize Yourself with the Exam: Understand the format, content areas, and the structure of the ASWB exam. Visit the ASWB website (www.aswb.org) to gather information about the exam and its requirements.
- Review the Exam Content Outline: The ASWB provides a content outline that details the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for each level of licensure. Review the outline to understand the key areas that will be covered in the exam.
- Gather Study Materials: Obtain study materials such as textbooks, study guides, and practice tests specifically designed for the ASWB exam. These resources can be found online, in bookstores, or through professional organizations.
- Develop a Study Plan: Create a study schedule that allows you to allocate time for each content area. Set specific goals for each study session to stay organized and focused. Allow somewhere between a few weeks to a few months.
- Study the Content Areas: Begin studying each content area outlined by the ASWB. Take comprehensive notes, highlight key concepts, and use mnemonic devices or other memory aids to help retain information. Understand the theories, principles, and practice skills relevant to social work.
- Practice with Sample Questions: Utilize practice exams that mimic the format and difficulty level of the ASWB exam. This will help you become familiar with the types of questions you may encounter and improve your test-taking skills.
- Join Study Groups or Find Study Partners: Collaborate with other social work students or professionals who are also preparing for the exam. Engaging in discussions, sharing study resources, and reviewing concepts together can enhance your understanding and retention of the material.
- Take Care of Yourself: Maintain a healthy lifestyle during your exam preparation. Get enough sleep, eat well-balanced meals, and engage in regular physical activity. Taking care of your well-being will improve your cognitive function and ability to focus.
- Simulate Exam Conditions: As you near the exam date, simulate the test conditions by taking timed practice exams. This will help you get accustomed to the time constraints and develop effective time management strategies.
- Stay Calm and Confident: On the day of the exam, ensure you arrive early, have all necessary documents, and maintain a positive mindset. Take deep breaths, manage your time wisely, and trust in the preparation you have done.
To prepare for the ASWB exam, the licensure examination for social workers in the United States and Canada, follow these ten steps. Next thing you know, you'll be happily waving a pass sheet.
Like any diligent social work licensing exam prepper, you want to get the most learning done for the least amount of cash. It's doablee. There are lots of free LCSW, LMSW, and LSW resources on the web, with more being created every day. SWTP has this video rundown of some suggested no-cost offerings (many of them on SWTP itself). The links mentioned are all included in this post. Cutting an pasting from there, two quick ones:
Free Practice Test Free set of ten practice questions complete with thorough rationales and suggested study links for each question (just like SWTP's full-length exams). Blog Practice Questions Long series of free practice questions--some with video walk-throughs--not included on SWTP's full-length exams. Even the most determined free practice question seeker will eventually run out of discoveries. Then it's time to get full exams, which come with the added bonus (on most sites, at least) of being balanced topic-area-by-topic-area in the same proportions as the ASWB exam itself; scoring your test--it's nice to know how you're doing!; and, via that score, highlighting areas where you're missing questions and need extra focus. Good luck on your search and your studies!
From SWTP, here's a series of quick, to-the-point practice question walk-through videos to help get you ready for the social work licensing exam. The collection of five-ish-minute videos lean more DSM than the exam itself--they're great for DSM review.
They're also really helpful for helping you learn how to approach questions as you're presented with them. The questions you ask yourself about the questions: "What kind of question is this?" "How do I best answer this type of question?" There's nothing like practice questions to help you get ready to take the big load of 170 questions that make up the ASWB exam. Find them wherever you can!
Even social workers don't do everything out of the goodness of their hearts. They often expect a paycheck. Social work exam tutor, Phillip Luttrell, rightly expects he'll attract new paying tutoring customers by posting this free series of ASWB exam tutoring videos. There's nothing wrong with that. And, while he's doing it, everyone benefits.
In the videos, Luttrell walks through some essential exam strategies, acronyms, and test-taking best practices. Watch (or listen) and learn. Then get some practice tests and start putting them to use. Soon enough, you'll be exam ready. Showing up on exam day doesn't have to involve just dread and horror. If you're well prepped, you can sit for those four hours with a decent level of confidence. Those impossible-seeming questions? They're just testers. That close-call one that you were 50/50 on? You probably got it right. Or you got enough of those right to get over the finish line with a passing score. It's as easy as that. What's stopping you? In the pages of Social Work Today, you can find a treasure trove of vignettes just like the ones you'll encounter on the social work licensing exam. The only difference? They're not questions. The Eye on Ethics column provides example after example of the close-call social work ethical decisions just like the ones that exam writers like to include on the ASWB exam. Take a look at a recent column, Managing Ethics Emergencies. It includes this real-life situation: One morning I happened to witness a staffer behaving very inappropriately during his group meeting with a number of patients. By coincidence, I was in an adjacent room speaking with a patient and heard the staffer abusing several patients verbally and using graphic sexualized language. I was stunned. It's easy enough to imagine this as a question: "A social worker witnesses a co-worker..." Ending with, "What should the social worker do FIRST?" You don't need to have answers A-D to have an answer to that question. And you can imagine the A-D an exam writer might cook up. Talk to the social worker. Talk to the social worker's supervisor. Report to the state board. Document and monitor for repeat behavior. What the column's author, ethics authority Frederic Reamer, did was talk to the social worker's supervisor. He cites the Code of Ethics text that guides these types of decisions: Social workers should take adequate measures to discourage, prevent, expose, and correct the unethical conduct of colleagues (standard 2.10[a]). Social workers should be knowledgeable about established policies and procedures for handling concerns about colleagues' unethical behavior. Social workers should be familiar with national, state, and local procedures for handling ethics complaints. These include policies and procedures created by NASW, licensing and regulatory bodies, employers, agencies, and other professional organizations (standard 2.10[b]). Social workers who believe that a colleague has acted unethically should seek resolution by discussing their concerns with the colleague when feasible and when such discussion is likely to be productive (standard 2.10[c]). When necessary, social workers who believe that a colleague has acted unethically should take action through appropriate formal channels (standard 2.10[d]). You probably don't need to turn to the pages of SWT to think up similar dilemmas. You've encountered them first-hand. Think of those events--what would they look like on the social work exam? This isn't wasted mental exercise. It's just the type of prep that gets you all-the-more ready to pass the social work exam. Good luck! Is getting there half the fun? When it comes to the social work licensing exam, probably not. There's nothing quite like hitting the final button after the four-hour exam, holding your breath, and seeing the result pop up on the screen: PASS. That's fun. But ask just about any social worker who has made it through the process and they'll tell you they learned something along the way. Not just how to sit for a long, 170-question exam without melting down, but valuable social work content that they now put to use in their day-to-day social work practice. For some, it's a thorough imbibing of social work ethical concepts and guidelines--material that may not have been well-covered in social work school. For others, it's digging into the nitty gritty of the DSM that sticks with them most. Other social workers may have stretched their understanding of the different ways social work can be practiced: attachment theory, family systems, CBT... Unless you were in a rare social work program, chances are not everything that you learn to get ready for the social work exam was covered in class. You're left with gaps. There's new material to learn. Getting it learned maybe isn't half the fun, but, if you're curious and like to learn--true of most social workers--it can still be fun. Just remember to celebrate the victories along the way. The concepts grasped, an increased score on a practice test. For every long study session, don't forget to give yourself a pat on the back. You did this. You're on your way. Soon you'll be licensed and you'll be able to put all of this away--except for what you've learned. That will stick with you. And that's a good thing. Congratulations in advance! By this point, it's probably not BREAKING NEWS to you that the NASW Code of Ethics has been updated. On January 1st, 2018, the new version of the code became the official guide for social work practice. To prepare for the social work licensing exam, you've always had to know what's what in the Code of Ethics. Now, that what's what has changed some. The updates reflect what's been updated in the world since the previous version of the code was penned. An ever-increasing proportion of clients'--and social workers'--lives happen on line. Clinical questions result. What, for example, are you to do if a client tries to friend you on Facebook? And what is ethical when it comes to researching clients' backgrounds on Google? The newly updated code has guidance on these and several other net and social media-related questions. There have also been nips and tucks in other parts of the text. Instead of reading and trying to pick up what's new, take a look at these helpful walk-throughs: Practice tests at major companies should have been updated by now--they have been at SWTP. It's worth double-checking. Old questions on the same topics may have been properly answered with something like, "The Code of Ethics does not have guidelines about such and such." Well, now it does. Time to learn them. Enjoy! Once upon a time, when you passed the social work exam, you'd tell family, friends, and coworkers. They'd probably be happy for you. Maybe they'd even get you a cake with a big "LMSW" or "LCSW" or whatever on it. Then...back to work. And that'd be the end of it.
Times have changed. Now you can share your social work exam success with the world by posting on the web. And, while you're doing that, you'll be inspiring and motivating social workers who are still preparing for the exam. Which means you'll be putting your licensure to immediate good use. People toiling on social work exam prep need all the wind beneath their wings they can get! To peruse a gallery of happy faces delighting in their victory over the social work licensing exam, check out the SWTP Blog. Instagram's also good (though people there tend to favor just a shot of the pass sheet itself, no smiling, elated social worker). What will you do when you pass? Sometimes visualizing the aftermath can help you catch a deeper breath and remember that a time after the social work exam will come. It's just a matter of months, weeks, days, and hours. Eventually, you'll be licensed. Good luck! Knowing DSM basics can only help as you sit down to take the social work licensing exam. That means depression, anxiety, substance use, psychotic disorders, and the like--the diagnoses social workers encounter every single day on the job. It also means having personality disorders understood. Encountering people with personality disorders tends to stick with you. It's fair to say those encounters will stick with exam writers too. So don't be surprised to see questions covering personality disorders on the ASWB exam. Personality disorders are grouped into three clusters, A, B, and C. One crude, but potentially helpful way to think about them is as the odd, the dramatic, and the anxious. We'll take each cluster alone in a post. Let's start with "the odd"--cluster A. Our quick-study summaries of each cluster A diagnosis follows: PARANOID PERSONALITY DISORDER. Pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent. SCHIZOID PERSONALITY DISORDER. Pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings. SCHIZOTYPAL PERSONALITY DISORDER. Pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with close relationships and cognitve or perceptual distortions and eccentricities. Paranoid PD is clear enough. Schizoid and schizotypal might be confused without a little bit of extra attention. Note that people with schizoid personality disorder don't desire close relationships and choose solitude. People with schizotypal personality disorder aren't uninterested in relationships, they're socially anxious. Schizotypal PD includes among its criteria odd beliefs, magical thinking, bodily illusions, and paranoid ideation. Intense eccentricity. All three of these share a criteria: Does not occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or other disorder with psychotic features. Hope this helps. Thanks for all you do! Let's forge ahead into another chapter of the DSM for a quick summary of its contents. These posts should be helpful as you get ready for the social work licensing exam. As we've said before, there's lots of content that can show up on the exam that isn't flash-card friendly. You'll encounter questions designed to probe whether or not you've got a good grasp on social work ethics and social work practice. Other questions are more fact based and getting the content for those lodged into your brain--at least for exam day--is worth your time. So...here we go.
Here are the basics from the Disruptive, Impulse-Control, and Conduct Disorders: OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANT DISORDER. A pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least 6 months. INTERMITTENT EXPLOSIVE DISORDER. Recurrent, unpremeditated behavioral outbursts representing a failure to control aggressive impulses. Diagnosed only after age 6. CONDUCT DISORDER. Repetitive, persistent pattern of behavior in which the rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated, lasting at least 6 months. PYROMANIA. Deliberate and purposeful fire setting. Includes fascination with fire, and gratification when setting fires or witnessing their aftermath. Fire setting not done for monetary gain. KLEPTOMANIA. Recurrent failure to resist impulses to steal unneeded objects. Includes gratification; not an expression of anger or vengeance. The chapter is rounded off by the usual "Other Specified" and "Unspecified" diagnoses. And there you have it. Hope it's a help. Get pratice with questions about these disorders--and lots of the other material you may encounter on the test--via practice tests from SWTP. Wishing you the best of luck on exam day! |
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December 2019
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