ok so i signed up for the test kind of impulsively after watching a few youtube videos and now its like 8 days away and im not sure i actually know enough. ive been going through the FAA study guide and some of the airspace stuff is starting to click but the weather section is still just... a lot. like i understand that i need to know about METARs and TAFs but when i actually look at one i still have to decode it super slowly.

been using Prepware and doing the practice tests and im hovering around 78-82% which i hear is passable territory but not exactly comfortable. should i be more worried than i am or is the actual test easier than the practice questions? also does anyone know if they really hammer the sectional chart stuff or is it more spread out across topics. i feel like every practice test i take has like 4 chart questions and i always get at least one wrong.

78-82 on Prepware is honestly fine, i took my test like two years ago and scored an 85 on the actual thing after averaging around 80 on practice. the real test felt slightly easier to me but that might just be because the question pool is finite and some of the Prepware questions are weirdly worded. the sectional chart stuff definitely shows up, probably 3-5 questions in my experience, mostly about airspace classes and reading the symbology. just make sure you know your class B, C, D airspace floors and ceilings cold, that stuff is pretty consistent.

for METARs dont overthink it, they mostly just want you to know if conditions are VFR or IFR and maybe identify cloud ceiling info. you dont need to decode the whole thing from memory, just the key fields.

i just passed mine like three weeks ago so this is fresh. honestly the weather stuff tripped me up too but what helped me was just memorizing a sample METAR line by line instead of trying to understand the whole system at once. theres a guy on youtube, i forget his name, but he does like a 20 minute walkthrough that made it way clearer than the FAA guide did for me. also the test center i went to was super chill, nobody breathing down your neck or anything, so dont stress the environment part at least.