Study Notes ABA helped 10,000+ students pass their BCBA certification

Students at ABA conferences walk up to Liat Sacks and say four words that make everything worth it: “You changed my life.”

They are not being dramatic. Passing the BCBA certification exam is what launches a career in behavioral health. It is the difference between working under someone else’s license and running your own practice, treating children with autism on your own terms. And for over 10,000 students, Study Notes ABA is how they got there.

What makes this story remarkable is not just the numbers. It is where it started: a woman recovering from health setbacks, sitting in a dark apartment, teaching behavioral science on a whiteboard to a camera. Eight years later, she runs a professional education platform with a 4.9-star app, a podcast approaching 5 million downloads, and a brand voice that shattered the clinical monotony of an entire industry.

The tagline? “Pass The F***ing Test.” The philosophy? Real. Raw. Relatable.

This is the story of how Liat Sacks built Study Notes ABA on BuddyBoss and LearnDash, and why thousands of behavior analysts consider it the best thing that ever happened to their careers.

About Study Notes ABA

Liat Sacks holds a Master of Education in Special Education from the University of Maryland and completed her Board Certified Behavior Analyst training through Florida Institute of Technology’s ABA Program. Her background spans special education classrooms, clinics, and in-home behavioral training. She knows the work because she has done the work.

In 2018, Liat’s own path to certification hit a wall. Health issues forced her to restart exam preparation from scratch. The experience was isolating, frustrating, and unnecessarily difficult. Not because the material was beyond her, but because the study resources available were dry, jargon-heavy, and completely disconnected from how people actually learn.

So she started teaching. She set up a whiteboard in her apartment, hit record, and began breaking down the BCBA curriculum in a way that made sense. No clinical jargon for its own sake. No textbook monotone. Just clear, direct instruction from someone who had recently lived through the same struggle her students were facing.

What started as recorded whiteboard sessions evolved into professionally produced video courses, live study groups, mock exams, and a full community platform. Today, Study Notes ABA operates from Dallas, Texas with a team of 11 to 50 employees. The company has helped more than 10,000 students pass the BCBA and BCaBA certification exams.

Challenges

The BCBA exam is brutally hard, and study materials were clinical and isolating

Applied Behavior Analysis is the science of understanding why people behave the way they do and how to help change behavior through environmental modifications. Board Certified Behavior Analysts primarily work with individuals with developmental disabilities, particularly autism. The work changes lives. Getting certified to do it is one of the hardest paths in professional education.

The certification requirements are steep: a master’s degree, 1,500 to 2,000 hours of supervised fieldwork, and a rigorous 185-question exam covering 9 content areas across 163 task list items. Traditional study materials matched the difficulty with dryness. Clinical language piled on clinical language. Real-world application was an afterthought. Students were expected to memorize, not understand.

Liat experienced all of this firsthand. After health issues forced her back to square one with exam prep, she realized the problem was not the students. The problem was how the material was being taught. Behavioral science is fascinating when you strip away the unnecessary complexity. But nobody was stripping it away.

Students needed community, accountability, and mobile access

BCBA candidates are spread across the globe. They study alone, often while working full-time jobs in clinics, schools, or homes providing behavioral services. The isolation compounds the difficulty. When you hit a concept you do not understand, there is no one to ask. When motivation dips at 10 PM after a full day of fieldwork, there is no one to pull you forward.

The existing options were limited: expensive university programs or static study guides with zero community element. No platform combined structured courses, community support, exam-specific practice, and mobile accessibility in one place. Students needed all of it, and nothing on the market delivered.

“It was like a literal moment. Like, oh my god, I’m doing something right.”

Liat Sacks, Founder of Study Notes ABA, on realizing the platform was resonating with students. Source: public interview.

Solutions

A branded learning community on BuddyBoss and LearnDash

Liat built studynotesaba.com on WordPress with BuddyBoss for the community layer and LearnDash for course delivery. The combination gave her everything she needed: structured curriculum, social features, discussion forums, and a storefront, all under one roof and one brand.

The platform’s flagship offering is The Collective, a 12-week live Zoom study group that meets Monday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30 PM CST. Sessions run 1.5 to 2 hours and cover the entire BACB 5th Edition Task List from start to finish. Students do not just watch recordings. They show up, engage with peers, and work through the material together with live instruction.

Beyond The Collective, the platform offers professionally recorded video bundles in 1, 2, and 4-month packages for students who need flexible scheduling. Full-length mock exams modeled on the actual BCBA exam format let students test themselves under realistic conditions. BuddyBoss powers the community features: discussion forums where students work through confusing concepts together, peer support channels, and the social connections that turn isolated studying into a shared experience.

The WooCommerce integration rounds out the ecosystem. Students can purchase SAFMEDS flashcards, branded notebooks, study materials, and merchandise directly from the platform. A separate continuing education portal at ceu.studynotesaba.com serves post-certification professionals who need CEU credits to maintain their credentials.

What ties it all together is the brand voice. “Pass The F***ing Test” is not just a tagline. It is a philosophy that breaks through the clinical tone dominating the ABA field. The community features powered by BuddyBoss let that personality come through in every interaction, every forum post, every course discussion. This is not a sterile LMS. It is a place where students feel like they belong, where they can ask the real questions and ditch the jargon.

As the Study Notes ABA brand puts it: “We built a community where you can ask the real questions, ditch the jargon, and finally feel like you get it.”

A mobile app that extends the learning experience

While the web community and courses run on BuddyBoss and LearnDash, Liat’s team at Bx Connections LLC built a dedicated mobile app to extend the experience with exam-specific practice features. The two platforms work in tandem: BuddyBoss for community and course delivery, the SNABA app for on-the-go practice.

The app includes over 2,500 practice questions organized across all 163 BCBA task list items in fluency, application, and scenario formats. Students set their actual test date and receive a personalized study plan that paces their preparation accordingly. A leaderboard and badge system turns practice into friendly competition. A doodle feed lets students share handwritten notes. A built-in discussion board helps them work through tricky concepts. Even a breathing and meditation tool acknowledges what every exam candidate knows: sometimes you need to step back before you can move forward.

The results speak for themselves. The SNABA app carries a 4.9 out of 5 rating with 3,418 ratings on iOS, making it one of the highest-rated exam prep apps in the behavioral science space.

One student review captured the experience perfectly: “It doesn’t feel like studying. The creators make studying seamless and fun, and easy to use.” Another wrote: “The app is awesome in many ways. A great way to connect with fellow testers and study for all content areas.”

The Behavior Bitches Podcast: a content engine feeding the community

Liat co-hosts the Behavior Bitches podcast with Casey McDaniel, M.S., BCBA, who also serves as COO of Study Notes ABA. The show applies behavioral science to real-world topics: addiction, relationships, mental health, and conversations with guests ranging from forensic BCBAs to people whose stories reframe how listeners think about behavior.

The numbers are staggering for a niche professional education podcast. Nearly 5 million total downloads. Roughly 25,000 listeners per episode. Over 108 episodes released. Ranked number 15 in Social Sciences on Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every other Monday across Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.

The podcast is not a side project. It is the top-of-funnel engine that drives students to the BuddyBoss-powered platform. Listeners discover Liat and Casey through the show, connect with their approach to making behavioral science accessible, and then enroll in courses and join the community. It is a textbook example of how a strong content engine feeds a learning community.

Conclusion

From a whiteboard in a dark apartment to a platform that has helped more than 10,000 students pass one of behavioral science’s most demanding exams. That is the Study Notes ABA story, and it is still being written.

BuddyBoss and LearnDash power the web community and course delivery. A custom mobile app puts exam practice in students’ pockets. A podcast with nearly 5 million downloads brings new students into the ecosystem every week. And a brand voice that refuses to be boring proves that professional education does not have to sound like a textbook.

The numbers tell part of the story: 4.9-star app rating, 42,000 Instagram followers, a podcast ranked in the top 15 of its category, and a team that has grown from one person to over a dozen. But the number that matters most is the one Liat hears at every ABA conference, from students whose careers exist because Study Notes ABA existed for them.

“You changed my life.”

Liat owns her platform, her community, and her data. No per-member fees. No platform lock-in. No algorithm deciding who sees her content. She built it on technology she controls, and that independence is what lets Study Notes ABA stay exactly what it has always been: real, raw, and relatable.