What is Planning Prep?

Planning Prep is a web-based study resource to help planners prepare for the American Institute of Certified Planners’ certification exam.

Members have access to our growing database of practice questions, practice exams, planning related links.

Currently, we have 1668 practice questions and 12 practice exams aimed at refreshing, broadening, and testing their planning knowledge. Each question contains an explanation for each correct answer, so our members know why one answer is correct and another is not. Links for further reading are also provided with our questions, to help our members find additional information about the topic.

Membership

Membership to Planning Prep is free. Why? Great question - see the FAQ

Brief History

When we were studying to take the exam in 2001, most of the study materials consisted of a photocopied collection of “legacy” documents passed between coworkers. The Internet was still relatively young - Yahoo! was directory based, Alta-Vista was a popular search engine, Google was still tweaking algorithms, and Trevor had hair. In short, there was no easily searchable online resource to turn to - no Wikipedia, no nothing. We would take mock practice exams with just an answer key that only told you the correct answer – A,B, C or D. That’s it. No explanation, no rationale, and no guarantee the answer in the key was even correct.

Then we had an idea to build a site that helped you learn, letting you know the rationale of an answer and one that could be edited. At first we thought “this would be huge” – we were going to make millions. We began writing code and content and started to make plans for the money we were going to make. It took about 4 months to write the code and about 6 months for the content – we had day jobs after all.

After our first year we were approached by the AICP who wanted to buy the site and operate it themselves. Apparently our asking price – reasonable compensation for our time – was too much, and they passed. The next year we received an award from the Illinois Chapter of the American Planning Assocaition. To date we have helped more than 6,000 planners through this site and many more with our training courses throughout the Country.

We wish you the best of luck in studying and taking the exam and we hope you find the site useful.

Sincerely,

Devin Lavigne & Trevor Dick
Planning Prep Co-Creators

Question of The Week

When a homeowner converts a portion of their existing structure into a second dwelling unit it is sometimes called an ___________ unit.

  A)   additional residential
  B)   add-on
  C)   accessory dwelling
  D)   acceptable re-subdivided

   

Important Dates

Spring 2021

Registration Window: January 19 - April 2, 2021
Testing Window: May 1-25, 2021

You can find the full details here

Features

  • 1668 practice questions, taken by random, by category (i.e. history, theory and law), or searchable by keyword.  Questions provide the answers to the questions, along with links providing additional research.

  • 12 Practice exams, 150-questions in length to help you pace and prepare for the AICP* exam.

  • Detailed user statistics tell each of our members their strengths and weaknesses. They know how many questions they have taken, how many they have gotten correct, as a total and by area of focus.

  • Links to all types of websites and resources for further research.