RBT Practice Exam

RBT Skill Acquisition Quiz

BACB Task List 3rd Edition aligned100% free, no signupLast updated August 2026Original questions with explanations

Skill Acquisition is the largest domain on the RBT exam, about a third of your scored questions, which makes it the single highest-value domain to master. This quiz drills the core teaching technology: discrete trial teaching, prompting hierarchies, shaping, chaining, verbal operants and reinforcement schedules.

If you only have time to drill one domain deeply before exam day, drill this one. The volume of questions makes it the difference between passing comfortably and sweating the scaled score.

10 questions · untimed · free, no signup

Skill Acquisition Domain Quiz (10 questions, untimed)

What the Skill Acquisition domain covers

The Task List items include identifying the essential components of a written skill acquisition plan, preparing for sessions, using contingencies of reinforcement, implementing discrete trial teaching, naturalistic teaching, task analyzed chaining, discrimination training, prompting and fading, shaping, token systems, and generalization and maintenance procedures.

Exam questions in this domain are heavily scenario-based: a description of a teaching interaction followed by 'which procedure is this?' The reliable preparation is knowing each procedure's defining feature, the one detail that separates it from its neighbors, like time delay changing when the prompt comes rather than what the prompt is.

Frequently asked questions

How many skill acquisition questions are on the RBT exam?
The published outline allocates 24 of 75 scored questions, about 32 percent, the largest share of any domain.
What is the difference between shaping and chaining?
Shaping reinforces successively closer approximations of one new behavior. Chaining links already-existing behaviors into a sequence using a task analysis. If steps exist and need ordering, it is chaining; if the behavior does not exist yet, it is shaping.
What are the main verbal operants I need to know?
Mand (request, driven by motivation), tact (label of something present), echoic (repeating what was heard) and intraverbal (answering or conversing without echoing). The exam gives a scenario and asks which one it shows.
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