At your own peril.

I'm pretty good at standardized tests and cramming stuff into short-term memory. I had exactly 7 days from Indoc to training start. I took Sat/Sun off from studying - put all the books and my laptop in a bag and didn't open them at all.

However, I spent the other 5 days putting about 8+ hours each day into hard-core studying at a coffee shop. Had my notes open on the flight back to ATL, and studied the evenings prior to the test.

That plus the test material review was probably a bit of overkill for the ESV itself, but set me up for the procedural training so I wasn't hunting for answers and could work on the procedures themselves.

Failures are happening at the procedural level, by pilots a lot smarter than me. Especially if you haven't done 121 stuff before, this, it's not a cake walk.

My call: keep things in balance. Take some time off but definitely put in the effort as well. No need to start your DAL career with a training failure.