The BSW exam prep app for the ASWB Bachelors and Associate exams

The Bachelors exam is for generalist practice at bachelor's level, normally after a BSW. Depending on the state, it leads to titles such as LBSW, LSW or LSWA. The Associate exam is for jurisdictions that license applicants without a social work degree, and ASWB is explicit that the Associate and Bachelors exams share the same questions; only the pass line differs (which exam do I need?).

In 2025, 70.4% of 2,741 first-time Bachelors candidates passed, and 71.5% of 407 first-time Associate candidates. The Bachelors figure is the lowest first-time rate of any category ASWB reports on a representative sample, and it describes candidates who sat the old exam (the Bachelors exam in detail).

The weights match the Masters exam: Values and Ethics at 35%, Assessment and Planning at 33%, Intervention and Practice at 32%. The statements underneath do not. The Bachelors outline gives seven statements to the two competencies on research, evaluation, supervision and administration, against fifteen on the Advanced Generalist exam, and spends the difference on direct practice: Intervention Methods and Techniques alone carries 28 statements on your outline.

Some topics are yours alone. Task-centered practice appears on the Bachelors outline and on no other ASWB exam. Role play, role modeling and assertiveness training are on yours, absent from Masters and Advanced Generalist, and back again on Clinical. Family therapy models, a staple of general ASWB study guides, are on three outlines and not on yours (the full breakdown). A course built for the Bachelors outline teaches those differences.

Each of the 110 lessons is written in full, one per topic on your outline. A lesson opens with a short practice situation, builds the concepts up, and finishes with its questions; the median lesson is about 1,700 words, roughly 8 minutes of reading, and the longest take about a quarter of an hour. On a phone that length matters. A lesson you can finish in a single bus ride, or pick up at the section where you stopped, is one you will actually read.

After each lesson, answer its questions while the reading is fresh, then let topic-level spaced repetition bring the subject back on later days with questions you have not seen.

If you have just finished a BSW, much of the outline will be familiar, and the work is learning the exam: how the vignettes are built, what the qualifier words do, and how two timed hours feel. Start with the placement check, about 20 questions across all three content areas, to see where you stand. Then read the lessons in the weakest area first, and sit a full-length mock once you have covered about half the course, so the section lock and the clock are familiar well before the day. The Bachelors course has 27 lessons in Values and Ethics, 39 in Assessment and Planning and 44 in Intervention and Practice, so at about 12 lessons a week the reading takes 9 weeks.

Questions on this exam are usually short vignettes about one client and one decision (how to read them). Ten a day with every rationale read builds that reading faster than a weekend cram.

Both exams use the format every category shares: 122 questions, 110 scored and 12 unscored pretest items you cannot identify, in two sections of 61 with two hours each, and the first section locks once you submit it. The app's 12 mocks are drawn from the Bachelors pool with no question repeated across them, and Associate candidates sit the same mocks, because their exam draws on the same bank.

Sit the first one once you have read about half the lessons, then one every week or so. Read the results by content area, since a total hides where the marks went, and spend the days between mocks on drills in your weakest area. A run of results above target in all three areas is a better signal to book than any single score.

The download includes the whole of Chapter 1, Ethical Principles and Responsibilities: 8 lessons and 192 questions with full rationales, plus the placement check. Values and Ethics is 35% of the Bachelors exam, so the free chapter is the most heavily weighted part of your test. Premium opens the rest of the course, and every other category with it, for US$24.99 a year, or US$2.99 a week with a 3-day free trial.