The most common question we get — before anyone asks about price, difficulty, or instructors — is simply how long this will take. The honest answer is uncomfortable because it depends on where you are starting from. But after ten thousand students, the pattern is clear enough to be useful.

If you are within striking distance of passing right now, you might be done in thirty days. If you have not opened a math textbook since middle school, you are looking at three to six months of consistent work. The single factor that decides which camp you are in is your diagnostic score on day one, not how long ago you left school.

The three starting points

Before we can answer how long it will take, we have to know which of three groups you fall into. Every student we have ever worked with started in exactly one of them — and the timeline is remarkably consistent inside each group.

1. Near-pass. Your diagnostic is within 10 points of 145 in every subject. Thirty days of targeted review is enough.

2. Classic. Your diagnostic is 120 to 135 in your weakest subject. Eight to twelve weeks at an hour a day is the norm.

3. Cold start. Your diagnostic is below 120 in at least one subject. Plan for three to six months, and expect steady rather than dramatic progress.

The 45-minute rule

The single most reliable predictor of passing — more reliable than diagnostic score, more reliable than how long ago you left school — is whether a student studies at least forty-five minutes a day, five days a week. Not two hours on a Saturday. Not an hour on days you feel like it. Forty-five minutes, five times a week.

The reason is boring neuroscience: spaced repetition beats massed practice, and forty-five minutes is about the length of a single deep-work block before attention decays. It is also a time window most people can actually carve out — on a lunch break, after kids go down, before a shift. Sessions longer than ninety minutes start to lose efficiency fast.

What to do today, if you are serious

Take a diagnostic. Any diagnostic. Ours is free and takes about forty-five minutes, but if you already have an account somewhere else, use that one. The diagnostic is the one piece of data that unlocks every other decision — which subject to start with, how many weeks to plan, whether to sprint or settle in.

If you are a Near-pass, you are closer than you think and you should register for the real test in the next four weeks. If you are a Classic, you have a clean 8-to-12 week runway and the story we hear most often is that the finish surprised them. If you are a Cold start, slow is fine — you are not racing anyone.