BCBA exam topics

Domain B is the second-largest area at 24 of 175 scored questions (14%). It covers behavior, response and response class; respondent and operant conditioning; reinforcement and punishment (positive and negative, unconditioned and conditioned); motivating operations and their value-altering and behavior-altering effects; stimulus control, discrimination and generalization; schedules of reinforcement; the verbal operants; and derived stimulus relations.

Domain G is the largest area at 25 of 175 scored questions (14%). It covers using reinforcement and punishment procedures, prompting and prompt fading, modelling and behavioral skills training, shaping, discrete-trial and naturalistic teaching, task analysis and chaining, token economies and group contingencies, differential reinforcement (DRA, DRI, DRO, DRL), extinction and its side effects, and antecedent interventions including motivating-operation manipulations.

Domain E is 22 of 175 scored questions (13%). It covers the Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts: practising within your scope of competence, informed consent and client assent, confidentiality and records, avoiding multiple relationships and conflicts of interest, responsibilities to clients, stakeholders and supervisees, accurate documentation and billing, handling requests outside your competence, and reporting obligations.

Domain F is 23 of 175 scored questions (13%). It covers reviewing records and collaborating with other professionals, conducting skill and preference assessments, indirect assessment through interviews and rating scales, descriptive assessment in the natural environment, functional analysis conditions and their interpretation, identifying the function of problem behavior, and reporting assessment results in a way that supports a socially valid intervention.

Domain C is 21 of 175 scored questions (12%). It covers selecting a measurement procedure that matches the dimension of behavior targeted, continuous measures (count, rate, duration, latency, interresponse time) versus discontinuous time sampling, the accuracy, reliability and validity of measurement, interobserver agreement methods, equal-interval graphing conventions, and visual analysis of level, trend, variability, immediacy and overlap.

Domain H is 20 of 175 scored questions (11%). It covers choosing socially significant goals, selecting procedures on the basis of assessed function, the evidence base, client preference, contextual fit and available resources, planning generalization and maintenance from the start, monitoring treatment integrity, making data-based decisions to continue, modify or fade, and collaborating with caregivers and other professionals.

Domain I is 19 of 175 scored questions (11%) and is often unfamiliar to trainees who have not yet supervised anyone. It covers behavioral skills training, delivering performance feedback, monitoring and evaluating the effects of supervision, structuring supervision to meet BACB requirements, delegating only within a supervisee's assessed competence, and organisational behaviour management including performance diagnostics and systems-level interventions.

Domain D is 13 of 175 scored questions (7%). It covers internal and external validity and their common threats, the baseline logic of single-case designs (prediction, verification, replication), and choosing between reversal, multiple-baseline, alternating-treatments/multielement and changing-criterion designs, including the ethical constraints that rule out withdrawing an effective treatment for dangerous behavior.

Domain A is the smallest area at 8 of 175 scored questions (5%). It covers the goals of behavior analysis as a science — description, prediction and control — the philosophical assumptions underlying it (selectionism, determinism, empiricism, parsimony, pragmatism), explaining behavior from the perspective of radical behaviorism, distinguishing behaviorism from the experimental analysis of behavior, applied behavior analysis and professional practice, and identifying the dimensions of ABA.