Guide to passing Exam 1/P

I originally wrote this up the day after I passed the Exam. There is more stuff I'd like to add and some areas I'd like to polish, but short of leaving it in limbo forever I wanted to get this out there. I will come back and revise as the spirit moves me!
******************
So I recently passed Exam P. As a "career changer" with a full time job, wife, and 3 children (a 2 year old and 4 month old twins), I thought I could give some observations on how I prepared and how I would recommend others in similar situations should prepare. I'm going to stay away from the "why" and purely focus on the "how" here.

1. The first step I took, and this is the one that really convinced me to give Exam P a shot, is that I started reading Marcel Finan's pdf text book focused on Exam P. I would reccomend this to anyone who is even thinking about the exam. Read through the first 12 Chapters and see how comfortable you feel with the ideas in the material. I'm not saying you need to have mastered the material just yet, but you really need to have a good grasp of this material, as it is the basic foundation of the concepts in the exam.

2. Once you feel comfortable with that material, read Chapters 13-21 and try to do the associated problems. Discrete distributions are where you start seeing applications of the concepts, and the continuous distributions is where the material will start getting more difficult.

3. Ok, now that you have gotten this far, you need to learn calculus. When I started studying, it had been 17.5 years since my last calculus class. I had no recollection of any of the material at all. I found two great sources that will give you everything you need for this exam. The first is the book Calculus for Dummies by Mark Ryan. The book isn't very expensive, and you should be able to get it from the library. Chapters 1-14 are the important chapters for Exam P. He spends more time on integration of trig functions that you really need - read through this part but don't focus TOO much on the trig stuff. Chapter 15 is good to read as well, but not quite as important. The second source is The Calculus 1&2 tutor dvd set from MathTutorDVD.com. These DVDs are awesome! The instructor has a pleasant (if not a little dry) delivery, and I believe going through the whole set and taking detailed notes can get anyone up to the point they need to be for this exam. I ended up going back to certain chapters a few times as topics came up in future study that I wasn't feeling so comfortable with, I imagine you will do that as well.

4. Now, the rubber meets the road. For those of you who haven't studied math in a while, I think using only a study book is going to be difficult. The notation and conventions used, combined with some of the assumed knowledge (ie skipped steps in computations), will make the work difficult to follow. While the rest of the studying can be done using a textbook, I strongly recommend The Infinite Actuary's online Exam P course. Its not cheap, but then again, how much is your time worth? This course will save you at least 40 hours of studying - at $10 an hour, you have already saved the cost of the course. If you are a career changer with a family, time is your most valuable commodity, and the cost of the course is nominal compared with the actual value of the time it will save you. Also, you can email any question to Dave (the instructor), which is a nice resource to have.

5. Ok, you've spent a lot of time, and you've made it through all the material and all the practice problems. You are halfway there! Yes, I said halfway... Now, you need to work problems. A LOT of problem. Over and over. Then again and again. You need to work them until you can do it in your sleep (yes, I dreamed in Exam P material). You need to work them until you can recognize easily what needs to be done and can execute quickly. I used the SOA 149 sample problems and TIA Exams 1-4 (which are available for free even if you don't buy the course) as problems to work on. I made an Excel workbook that had one sheet for the SOA problems and one for the TIA. I listed out each problem vertically in 4 or 5 columns, and marked an X next to the ones I really felt I mastered. I had a formula that counted the X's and told me what percentage of the problems I mastered. This was great motivation, to constantly increase my percentage, and also gave me an assessment of how much more work I had to do. As I noticed which problems were giving me difficulty, I noted what type of problem it was, and did countif formulas to tell me what areas had the most problems I couldn't figure out, and those were the areas I focused more study on. I eventually got my SOA % up to 75 and my TIA % up to about 60. I never did master ALL of the material, but I did the best I could in the time allotted and I felt those levels at least gave me a chance to pass.

6. Now that you spent a few weeks doing that, you still have a week or so to go before the exam. Go back and redo EVERY problem, marking off the ones you can do quickly and efficiently in the same manner as above but on a new list. Your goal here is both speed and accuracy. This will ferret out the stuff you need a refresher on. As the week goes on and you review the areas that give you problems, redo those problems the in the next two days to drill the concepts in. Hopefully, you can get your percentage in this step near 70% or more.

7. In the two nights prior to the exam, roll back the problems working a little bit. Review the notes you have been making on formulas and concepts that have been problematic for you (I hope I needn't have told you to be taking notes every step of the way here). Watch Rocky 3 - that movie has some great analogies to this Exam studying process. Apollo at the beginning is college - you've beat him. The opponents Rocky was beating all along are your work assignments etc, stuff that you had to work to do, but wasn't as challenging as this. Clubber Lang - he is Exam P. Now, Apollo becomes the study guide you use, the online forums that provide guidance, etc.

Good luck!

**I'm adding this after having written the above post, I'll eventually get it into the body of the post but just found this and wanted to make sure it got linked from this page.  Apparently in the time since I originally wrote this, The University of Wisconsin has put together this excellent resource for SOA sample questions.  It is linked from the SOA Exam P page, and I wanted to mention it here because it looks like an excellent resource!  Go check it out!