The Certified Medical Assistant (AAMA) credential — CMA (AAMA) — is awarded by the Certifying Board of the American Association of Medical Assistants to medical assistants who pass the CMA (AAMA) Certification Exam: 200 multiple-choice questions, weighted toward clinical competency, taken in four timed segments. This guide works through the credential in full — its outline category by category, its eligibility categories, its scoring, and its 60-month recertification cycle. The companion program page, Certified Medical Assistant (AAMA CMA) exam preparation at /certified-medical-assistant-exam-prep/, describes the PassProfessor program being built for this examination.
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The credential at a glance
| Item | Verified position |
|---|---|
| Program | Certified Medical Assistant (AAMA CMA): the CMA (AAMA) Certification Exam of the Certifying Board of the American Association of Medical Assistants |
| Certifying body | Certifying Board of the American Association of Medical Assistants (AAMA); the examination is constructed and administered by PSI Services LLC; the certification program is accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) |
| Examination | 200 multiple-choice questions: 180 scored and 20 pretest questions that are not scored; four 40-minute segments (160 minutes of testing time), optional breaks between segments, 90-day testing period |
| Passing standard | Scores are reported on a scale of 200 to 800; the minimum passing score published by the Certifying Board is 405. A scaled score is not a percentage |
| Content weighting | Clinical Competency 106 of 180 scored questions (59%); General 38 (21%); Administrative 36 (20%), per the current Content Outline for the CMA (AAMA) Certification Exam |
| Eligibility | Five published categories, anchored in CAAHEP- or ABHES-accredited medical assisting programs, plus an alternative pathway and a medical assisting educator category; AAMA membership is not required |
| Examination fee (AAMA’s fee) | $125 for completing students and recent graduates; $125 for AAMA members and $250 for nonmembers in the other standard categories, as published in the AAMA exam application |
| Credential term | 60 months; recertification by continuing education (60 continuing education units) or by examination |
| Administrator note | PassProfessor is independent and is not affiliated with the AAMA or its Certifying Board |
The CMA (AAMA) rewards candidates who read it as a structure rather than a single test. One board certifies; one testing company builds and delivers the paper; three sections divide the scored questions in a fixed 59/21/20 proportion; five eligibility categories divide the candidate pool by training route; and one clock — 60 months — governs the credential from the day it is earned. The guide below takes each verified element in turn.
Reading the verified facts
Every fact in the table above was pinned to AAMA primary material — the Certifying Board’s Content Outline, its exam application and policies publication, and its certification and recertification pages — during this program’s research pass. Two reading rules apply throughout the guide. First, names are never merged: the CMA (AAMA) is this credential, the AAMA’s; the Certified Clinical Medical Assistant (CCMA) of the National Healthcareer Association and the Registered Medical Assistant (RMA) of American Medical Technologists are separate credentials with separate rules, and no fact from either appears in this guide. Second, the scoring is printed only in the form the AAMA publishes it: a scale of 200 to 800 and a minimum passing score of 405, set by the Certifying Board through a standard-setting study. The AAMA does not publish a raw cut score or a percentage, and this guide does not manufacture one.
The route, step by step
Step one — fix the eligibility category. The categories turn on training. Category 1 covers completing students and recent graduates of CAAHEP- or ABHES-accredited medical assisting programs: a completing student may sit on completing all required psychomotor and affective competencies and cognitive objectives short of the practicum, or no earlier than 30 days before completing all formal coursework including the practicum, with the program director verifying the dates; a recent graduate applies within 12 months of graduation. Category 2 covers nonrecent graduates of those accredited programs, applying with an official transcript. Category 3 covers CMA (AAMA) recertificants sitting by examination. Category 4, the alternative pathway, covers graduates of postsecondary medical assisting programs and apprenticeship programs that meet the Certifying Board’s stated requirements, entering through a documentation review before any fee is due. Category 5 covers medical assisting educators with at least 1,000 hours employed in a teaching or program director position in a qualifying postsecondary program. Step two — apply and pay the published fee for the category; fees are nonrefundable and nontransferable. Step three — schedule with PSI on receipt of the scheduling email, inside the 90-day testing period. Step four — sit the four segments in one appointment, taking or declining the optional breaks between them. Step five — take the result in its two stages: the pass/fail notification at the close of testing, then the official score report, with the overall scaled score and section performance, approximately 24 hours later. A candidate who does not pass holds up to six attempts inside the 12-month period that begins with the first attempt, each on a fresh application and fee, with no required waiting period — a policy that rewards prompt, diagnosed re-sitting over anxious delay.
The outline in full
The outline has three sections and eight categories. Each is stated here in full, because the CMA (AAMA) paper punishes partial preparation in a specific way: its sections are different kinds of knowledge, and fluency in one does not lend marks to another.
I.A Clinical Workflow: Patient Intake and Discharge
This category examines the encounter itself, from the door to the discharge instruction. Vital signs are examined as technique and interpretation together — blood pressure principles, pulse points, height, weight and body mass index, temperature techniques, pulse oximetry, respiration, pain, and paediatric measurement with growth charts — together with recognising and documenting age-specific normal and abnormal values. Medical terminology is examined in its working parts: roots, combining forms, prefixes and suffixes, and the terminology of diagnostic and surgical procedures. Interviewing technique, documentation of care — chief concern, subjective and objective data, review of systems, past history, medication and allergy reconciliation, and making addenda and corrections — patient screening and wellness assessment, nutrition and dietary counselling, processing provider orders, and discharge-side instruction including home monitoring and patient-administered treatments all sit here. The examined habit is completeness under time pressure: the intake that misses the allergy reconciliation or the screening question fails the item however warm the manner.
I.B Safety and Infection Control
Safety is examined as a system, not a poster. Infectious agents — bacteria, viruses, protozoa and parasites, fungi — the infection cycle and its modes of transmission, and the body’s natural barriers ground the category. Standard precautions and exposure control are examined in operational detail: OSHA requirements, personal protective equipment selection, hand hygiene, post-exposure protocol and eyewash stations, sharps and needle safety. Medical asepsis runs from sanitization and disinfection through sterilization technique and autoclave practice, with quality control measures; biohazard disposal and spill response follow. Safety resources — signs, symbols, safety data sheets — workplace safety and emergency preparedness, and emergency management and basic first aid complete the category: bleeding control, burns, cardiac and respiratory arrest, obstruction, diabetic emergencies, seizures, shock, stroke, fractures and the rest of the first-response repertoire. Items favour the candidate who treats precautions as the default state rather than a response to a known risk.
I.C Procedures/Examinations
The largest single territory in the outline, examined at the level of performed tasks. Preparing patients for examinations, procedures and treatments — examination methods from auscultation to percussion, body positioning across the standard positions, paediatric and obstetric/gynaecologic examinations — supplies, equipment and techniques including eye and ear irrigation, suture and staple removal, and cast and splint care; surgical assisting with asepsis, scrub, tray preparation and sterile field discipline; wound care from chronic wounds to ostomy care; anatomy and physiology in full — human growth and development, structural units, body systems in normal structure and function and then in abnormal structure, function, recognition and etiology, system by system; specimen collection across blood, urine, fecal, sputum and swab specimens, with venipuncture and capillary puncture technique examined closely; specimen processing and examination; laboratory panels and selected tests across urinalysis, hematology, chemistry and specialised testing; laboratory quality control and CLIA requirements; electrocardiography — standard 12-lead performance, artifact recognition, rhythm recognition, Holter and event monitors, cardiac stress testing; and the vision, hearing, allergy and respiratory testing battery. The candidate who has only watched these procedures, rather than performed and troubleshot them, meets the paper’s favourite trap: the step done almost correctly.
I.D Pharmacology
Pharmacology examines medications as the medical assistant handles them: classes of drugs, actions and desired effects, adverse reactions and allergic responses, contraindications, storage and inventory control. Preparing and administering oral and parenteral medications carries the category’s weight — the rights of medication administration, dosage and metric conversion and calculation, routes of administration with their safety precautions, injection site selection, needle length and gauge, and technique including the Z-track method. Documentation of administration and reporting of medication errors are examined as duties, not courtesies. Immunization resources complete the category: CDC schedules for children and adults, recordkeeping, the Vaccine Information Statement, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and vaccine storage.
II.E Legal and Ethical Issues
The legal category examines the frame that makes the rest of the work lawful. HIPAA and the HITECH Act anchor it: confidentiality and patient privacy, patients’ rights to inspect, amend and restrict their records, breach notification, and the security of electronic transmission. Protected health information is examined through its release rules — authorizations, the special handling of substance-use, HIV-related, mental health and genetic information, continuity-of-care releases, and use and disposal of PHI. Consent — informed and written, implied and verbal, and its exceptions — medical directives including advance directives, living wills, DNR and DNI orders, and durable power of attorney; federal and state regulation, professional liability and the torts, legal doctrines from respondeat superior to Good Samaritan protection; pharmaceutical law — prescriptions and e-prescribing, drug schedules, controlled substances; mandatory reporting and public health statutes, including communicable disease and abuse, neglect and exploitation reporting; ethical standards and incident and variance reporting complete the category.
II.F Communication
Communication is examined as a clinical instrument. Interpersonal skills and customer service; understanding human behaviour and mental health, including defence mechanisms and adaptive responses; adapting to communication barriers — death and dying, visual and hearing impairment, interpreter use, language difference, literacy, intellectual challenge, age-specific approaches for geriatric and paediatric patients; nonverbal communication; personal boundaries; de-escalation; listening skills and service recovery; therapeutic and adaptive responses including cultural diversity and the recognition of stereotypes and bias; learning styles and overcoming barriers to understanding; health care team roles, care coordination, and the patient navigator and advocate functions; and professional telephone etiquette and message protocol.
III.G Billing, Coding, and Insurance
The first administrative category examines the money accurately, which in a medical practice means examining it lawfully. Coding applications: CPT procedural coding with modifiers, upcoding and downcoding, bundling and unbundling; ICD-CM diagnostic coding; HCPCS Level II; and the linkage of procedure and diagnosis to medical necessity guidelines. Insurance fraud and abuse, coverage for patient services and waivers including the Advance Beneficiary Notice, eligibility verification, claims submission, explanation of benefits and remittance advice, claim rejection and follow-up, tracking unpaid claims; insurance types and third-party payers from commercial plans through Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and workers’ compensation; authorizations — precertification, prior authorization, denials and appeals; financial terminology; patient account procedures — posting charges, payments and adjustments, collecting payments, collection rules; financial calculations; and billing and collections practice including itemised statements and ageing of accounts.
III.H Scheduling Appointments and Health Information Management
The closing category examines the practice’s memory and its calendar: scheduling new and established patients, routine against urgent need, coordinating facility, equipment and personnel requirements, ancillary services, cancellations and no-shows; medical reception and patient registration — identification, identity theft protection, accurate billing information; and electronic health records — the patient portal, recognising and organising medical reports from history and physical to growth charts, medical record preparation and pre-visit planning including obtaining outside records and test results before the encounter.
A closer look: the outline changes, and the candidate’s calendar
One feature of this credential deserves a slower pass: the AAMA revises the examination’s content outline as the occupation changes, and the current outline — the one this guide states, with Clinical Competency at 59 percent — governs sittings in the current cycle. Candidates should confirm, at application, that the outline they have studied is the outline in force for their sitting, because preparation built faithfully on a superseded outline is still preparation for the wrong proportions. The same habit applies to the aggregate results the AAMA publishes for the examination: they describe past cohorts from accredited programs under standard conditions, and they are context for the examination’s seriousness, not a prediction for any individual candidate. What a candidate controls is the match between study and the current outline, and the discipline of the 90-day testing period: long enough to schedule deliberately, short enough that an application filed “to get it started” can expire into a re-application if life intervenes. Apply when the preparation is nearly ready, not when it is merely intended.
The sitting itself
The examination is computer-based, delivered by PSI, and taken as four 40-minute segments in one appointment, with an optional break available between segments and a tutorial before testing begins. Each segment is its own timed performance: pacing is set by fifty questions in forty minutes, and a segment’s unanswered questions do not wait politely for a calmer moment later. The practical disciplines follow. Work at a steady per-question pace and flag rather than stall; treat each segment break as a genuine reset, because the next fifty questions are a fresh paper in everything but name; and expect the 20 pretest questions to be indistinguishable from the scored 180 — every question is answered as if it counts, because the candidate cannot know which do not. The result arrives in two stages: the pass/fail notification at the close of the sitting, and the official score report approximately 24 hours later, carrying the scaled score and an approximation of performance by section — the diagnostic document a re-sitting candidate should study before studying anything else.
A study plan built on how this examination is actually put together
Build the plan in the order the paper is weighted. First, clinical competency as the main campaign — workflow, safety, procedures, pharmacology — studied as performed tasks, with specimen handling, injection technique, sterilization practice and dosage calculation worked until they are procedural rather than theoretical. Second, the general section as a rules discipline — HIPAA and PHI release, consent and directives, mandatory reporting — where the credited answer is usually the lawful one and precision of vocabulary carries marks. Third, the administrative fifth, taken seriously — coding linkage above all, because CPT, ICD-CM and medical necessity meet in single items, then claims flow, payer types and scheduling and records practice. Fourth, segment-paced mixed practice in blocks of fifty, because the sitting’s unit is the segment, not the question. Leave the final days for the administrative facts of the route itself: category, fee, window, retake rules — the details candidates most often learn from a rejected application instead.
The working method: turning the outline into a performance
Preparation fails most often as a scheduling problem disguised as a knowledge problem. The working method that answers it has four moving parts. Timed blocks, always — every practice session in segment units, forty minutes, no pausing, no references — because pacing is a trained reflex. An error log, kept honestly — every missed item recorded with its category and the reason: unknown fact, misread stem, arithmetic slip in a dosage calculation, or a rule filed to the wrong body of knowledge. After two weeks the log, not the candidate’s impressions, says where study belongs. Procedure-first drills — a standing share of every session works the performed tasks step by step: the venipuncture sequence, the autoclave cycle, the injection sites — because the paper examines steps in order and catches the one done out of sequence. Calculation in working dress — metric conversion and dosage arithmetic practised inside clinical scenarios with units attached, never as bare sums. Run weekly, the method converts an eight-category outline into reflexes, which is the form in which a four-segment sitting rewards knowledge.
The errors this examination is built to catch
The paper is built to catch a recognisable set of errors. Studying the clinical and skipping the administrative is the largest: a fifth of the scored paper is a large thing to donate. Treating the credentials as interchangeable — preparing from CCMA or RMA material for the AAMA paper — fails on eligibility before it fails on content. Converting the passing standard into a percentage misleads practice targets; 405 on a 200-to-800 scale is a scaled standard, and the AAMA publishes no raw equivalent. Letting the 90-day period drift turns an application into an expiry. Procedure steps in the wrong order — the asepsis break, the mislabelled specimen, the skipped verification — are the clinical paper’s signature trap. Finally, ignoring the recertification horizon after passing: 60 months pass quickly, and a credential expired beyond three months returns only by examination.
The credential in one view
The CMA (AAMA) in one view is a generalist credential examined as a generalist actually works: at the intake desk and the treatment-room bench, on the telephone and in the ledger, under law the whole time. Its structure is honest about that — 59 percent clinical, a fifth administrative, the legal and communicative frame across the rest — and its eligibility gate insists the candidate arrived through real education in the occupation. The candidate who prospers is the one who stops asking which single fact a question wants and starts asking which part of the working day it stands in — rooming, assisting, collecting, coding, scheduling, telephoning — because the paper is organised the way the practice is organised, and preparation organised the same way meets it on its own ground.
After the sitting: the credential and its clock
Passing starts the 60-month clock. Current status must be maintained to use the credential; recertification is earned with 60 continuing education units — at least 30 of them AAMA units — or by passing the examination again, and the three-month line after expiry decides which of those routes remains open. The sensible holder treats the cycle as continuing practice: units logged steadily, the recertification date diarised well ahead, and the section-performance habits of the first sitting — the error log, the outline discipline — retained as the shape of staying current in an occupation whose procedures, codes and payer rules keep moving.
Frequently asked questions
Who writes and administers the CMA (AAMA) Certification Exam?
The credential belongs to the Certifying Board of the American Association of Medical Assistants; PSI Services LLC constructs and administers the examination. The certification program is accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA).
How many questions are on the exam, and how are they divided?
200 multiple-choice questions: 180 scored and 20 pretest. The scored questions divide as Clinical Competency 106 (59%), General 38 (21%), and Administrative 36 (20%), per the current AAMA Content Outline.
How is the exam timed?
Four 40-minute segments in one sitting — 160 minutes of testing — with optional breaks between segments, taken inside a 90-day testing period after scheduling through PSI.
What score passes?
A scaled score of 405 or more, on the AAMA’s scale of 200 to 800. The Certifying Board sets the minimum through a standard-setting study and may revise it; the scale score is not a percentage.
I trained years ago. Which eligibility category am I?
Most likely Category 2 — nonrecent graduate of a CAAHEP- or ABHES-accredited program — applying with an official transcript. Completing students and recent graduates (within 12 months of graduation) are Category 1; recertificants are Category 3; the alternative pathway is Category 4; qualifying educators are Category 5.
Must I be an AAMA member to sit?
No. Membership is not required; it affects the fee in some categories — $125 for members against $250 for nonmembers, with completing students and recent graduates at $125 regardless.
What if I fail?
You may re-sit, up to six attempts within the 12-month period beginning with your first attempt, with no required waiting period; each attempt needs a new application and fee. Your official score report’s section performance shows where the next attempt should be prepared.
How is the CMA (AAMA) different from the CCMA and the RMA?
Different bodies, rules, and papers. CMA (AAMA) is the AAMA Certifying Board’s credential, gated on accredited-program education; CCMA is the National Healthcareer Association’s; RMA is American Medical Technologists’. Preparation and eligibility do not transfer between them.
How long is certification valid?
60 months. Current status is required to use the credential.
How does recertification by continuing education work?
Earn 60 continuing education units inside the cycle, at least 30 of them AAMA units and at most 30 non-AAMA units, meeting the Board’s published distribution — or recertify by passing the examination. If the credential has been expired more than three months, only the examination route remains.
Does this guide’s program page offer enrollment?
Not yet. The PassProfessor Certified Medical Assistant (AAMA CMA) program is in the works; the program page at /certified-medical-assistant-exam-prep/ carries the notify form.
Is PassProfessor affiliated with the AAMA?
No. PassProfessor is an independent preparation provider. The Certifying Board alone awards the credential and sets its rules.
When does enrollment open for the PassProfessor program?
The program is in the works and enrollment is not yet open. Leave an email address on this page and PassProfessor will write to you when the program is ready — and only about this program.