The Certified Professional Coder (CPC) Exam is offered by the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) and has great value for jobs opportunities. Everyone would like to clear the CPC exam in the first attempt. Right preparations and training could make it easy to do so. This test is not about memorization. It’s about knowing how to find the best answer.

A clear understanding of Anatomy, Medical terminology, Modifiers, CPT section wise guidelines and ICD 10 CM chapter specific guidelines is very important to pass CPC exam in the very first attempt. It’s an open book exam 150 questions for the duration of 5 hours and 40 minutes be on time try to be one hour early to the exam place and try to complete the exam within 5 hours and 30 minutes. 70% and above is considered as pass.

Make a practice of rule out among the four choices to find the correct answer, the presence of a modifier, ICD codes are the best clue to rule out. Read the complete description of the given CPT and ICD codes from the book and compare with the questions. Make sure to watch all the instructions (Included/Don’t code/Use in conjunction with etc) given below the CPT’s or guidelines given in paragraphs at the beginning of the respective code range.

Time management is very important during CPC exams. Few questions may take a few secs to find the answer but few tough scenarios may eat our time. Don’t waste time in reading the huge paragraph or complicated scenarios, let’s try to skip the difficult questions and clear it later. After completing all the known questions later you may have plenty of time to read the whole scenario to understand. Surgery section is the tough one, where questions will be around 4-5 lines and it will take at least 2-3 minutes to understand the whole question. So, here you have to understand where to spend and save time while solving your question paper. Not to worry, in the last section, you will get questions of 1 line only, which can be answered in the matter of 30 seconds. So, you should plan to solve your question paper.

The Exam covers question from each chapter

• 10 questions from 10,000 series codes
• 10 questions from 20,000 series codes
• 10 questions from 30,000 series codes
• 10 questions from 40,000 series codes
• 10 questions from 50,000 series codes
• 10 questions from 60,000 series codes
• 10 questions from Evaluation and Management
• 8 questions from Anesthesia
• 10 questions from Radiology
• 10 question from Laboratory and Pathology
• 10 questions from Medicine
• 8 question from Medical Terminology
• 8 question from Anatomy
• 10 question from ICD 10-CM/Diagnosis
• 5 questions from HCPCS Level II
• 6 questions from Coding Guidelines
• 5 questions from compliance and Regulatory

You should be able to plan every minute of the exam. Each second or minute is important during the CPC exam.