Kate Gardner Built Backspace Prep for BCBA Exam Retakers

A study fix turned into a product

BACKSPACE PREP – Kate Gardner has always been a terrible test taker, in her own words. She got through school on homework, participation, and being good in class, she said, because the exams themselves never went well.

Gardner became a BCBA in 2015, is licensed as a behavior analyst in Illinois and Kansas, is a practicing clinician, and is a mother of two. Her education consists of a master’s degree in behavior analysis and therapy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a bachelor’s in psychology from Illinois State University. Along with that, Gardner recently started as an Executive Adviser in Clinical Operations at Mind for Mission. She helps individuals launch their own companies, including in the ABA space.

Kate shared that she passed the BCBA exam on her first attempt, after building herself a study system grounded in retention and retrieval rather than review. She has used the same system since to coach students she has worked with for the last 15 years.

The company came later. Gardner said she stepped back from a leadership role after the birth of her second child, took a part-time BCBA job, and began building Backspace Prep around the method she had been sitting on for years.

What pushed her to do it was the data table of BACB pass rates. Of the 9,955 candidates who sat the BCBA exam for the first time in 2025, only 51% passed. Of the 13,196 who sat it again after failing, only 23% passed, according to the Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s certificant annual report data, updated in January 2026.

“I was floored,” Gardner shared with BreakingNewsABA. She believes that candidates are studying the wrong way, and that the tools now available make the habit easier to keep.

“It’s not an age of information, it’s the age of consumption.” – Kate Gardner, founder, Backspace Prep (2026)

Consumption, in her account, is reading, watching, listening, and rereading. Generative AI has deepened the habit, she argues, because it “perfectly generates information for you to consume, never requiring you to produce it yourself.”

Where the retaker market stands

The figures Gardner cites are the BACB’s own, and the trend behind them runs longer than a single year. According to the board’s published series, the first-time pass rate has fallen from 66% in 2020 to 51% in 2025, the lowest point in the series. The retake pass rate dropped from 31% to just 23% over the same period.

The bigger picture is in the volumes. Retake candidates have outnumbered first-time candidates every year since 2022, and the gap has widened each year since. In 2025, there were 13,196 retake sittings against 9,955 first-time sittings, and first-time volume has fallen from its 2021 peak of 12,107.

That is the market Backspace Prep sells to. By the board’s own count, it is the larger half of the exam pool, and the half that keeps growing.

What The Method asks candidates to do

According to its website, Backspace Prep offers two products. The Method costs $59 as a one-time payment and includes 10 recorded modules plus a resource library. The Guided Method is $249 and adds 4 sessions with Gardner.

The modules teach a study system rather than exam content, Gardner said. It is built around flashcards the candidate writes out themselves in a specified way, then sorts into piles, with the piles serving as the progress measure. Once a candidate has mastered the piles, she said, they are ready to sit the exam.

The website describes the same product in different terms. It names the generation effect, retrieval practice, and the production effect, which is the benefit of saying answers aloud, and it states that “The BCBA exam doesn’t test recognition. It tests retrieval.”

The research behind those terms is well established. Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger, writing in Science in 2008, found that repeated studying after learning did not affect delayed recall, while repeated testing produced a large positive effect. The same study found that students’ predictions of their own performance were uncorrelated with how they actually performed.

A 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by John Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing and distributed practice as high-utility study techniques, and rated rereading and highlighting as low-utility, noting that rereading and highlighting are what most students report using. A 2019 PNAS study found that spacing reviews based on a learner’s recall probability outperformed uniform schedules, with the advantage widening over longer study periods.

The sorting mechanic predates that literature. It matches the system the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner set out in 1972, in which a card recalled correctly moves to a group reviewed less often, and a card missed returns to the first group. Leitner’s system has no experimental literature of its own, however, and it borrows support from the retrieval and spacing research above.

Where Backspace Prep sits in the market

Gardner’s own read of her competition is that the market is saturated, despite the increasing trend in retesters, and that she competes by speaking directly to her customer. The saturation is documented. Pass the Big ABA Exam has operated since 2012 and sells mock exams starting at $25. StudyABA sells a $150 package and says it has administered more than 30,000 mock exams in 66 countries. AATBS, in business for more than 40 years, sells a premium tier with a “Prep Until You Pass” guarantee of access until the candidate passes.

The retaker niche is not empty either. ABA Retake sells recordings under the line “Retaking the BCBA Exam? Strategic Support That Actually Works,” aimed at the same candidate.

Gardner believes she offers something uniquely different to retesters: teaching them how to study, not just what to study. Her stated goal is to keep helping retesters pass on their next attempt and to get the word out about what she can do. If the current pass rate of test takers stays on its current trajectory, she will have more clients than she can handle.

AT A GLANCE

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