Am I ready is the wrong question, because your feelings will answer it for you, and feelings are terrible adjudicators. The night-before dread of a prepared player and the night-before dread of an unprepared one feel identical from inside. Replace the question with a checklist that has yes-or-no answers.
The checklist
One. A cold first take of every excerpt, at the marked tempo, holds together. Not perfect, together: pulse intact, no breakdowns, recoverable smudges only. If you can only play it after three warmup runs, the room version is the warmup run.
Two. Three days in a row. Readiness that shows up once is a coin flip. Readiness that shows up three consecutive days is yours. One clean day proves the ceiling, three prove the floor, and the panel meets your floor.
Three. You can miss and continue. Somewhere in the take, a note will go wide. Ready means the next bar is unaffected. If a miss still costs you the following phrase, that recovery skill is the highest-leverage thing left to practice.
Four. The tempo you start is the tempo you finish. Record a full run and check the pulse at the top against the pulse at the end. A drift you can hear is a drift the panel scores.
Five. The whole packet is covered: excerpts, the scale list, and sight-reading if your audition includes it. Panels routinely separate close candidates on scales, the thing everyone deprioritizes because it is boring. Boring is where chairs are won.
Two weeks out, one week out, three days out
Two weeks out, your job is gap-closing. Run the checklist, find the two weakest items, and give them seventy percent of practice time. Everything else is maintenance. Two weeks is enough to move one dimension meaningfully if the practice is aimed.
One week out, stop learning and start performing. Daily mock auditions: full program, one take, performance clothes if that helps you take it seriously. Tape the run, score it, fix only what is fixable in a day. No new fingerings, no new bowings, no experiments. The week before is for consolidation, not construction.
Three days out, protect the instrument that matters most, which is you. Short sessions, slow practice, long sleep. The notes are in your hands by now or they are not. The remaining variable is the nervous system you carry into the room, so spend the last days making it a calm one.
Ready is not perfect
Nobody walks in perfect. The players who advance are the ones whose worst take is still a performance: pulse held, sound centered, misses absorbed. Perfection is not on the checklist because it is not on the panel's sheet either.
If the checklist comes back mostly yes, walk in and play. If it comes back mostly no, that is not a verdict on you, it is two weeks of aimed work with your name on it. Either way, you should know which one it is before the room tells you.