Post-SDM wrap up

I considered typing up a post the day before I took my exam last week.  I was exhausted, stressed, almost non-functional as a human being.  I still participated with my family and took care of my kids, but the glaze of exam burnout had hit.  I decided from an efficiency standpoint not to expend the energy to type up a post, but I’ll try to relate the whole study sitting’s experience here.

I had a strong suspicion that I passed last time I took CFE, so I downloaded as many of the readings as I could before I got the official pass in January.  There weren’t a ton, but I did try to read up as much as I could.

Once I got the official pass in January, I ordered the source material as well as the PAK study manual and online seminar.  I was a big fan of the PAK material for this sitting, especially the videos.  I felt the PAK study notes by themselves were a little tough to get context on without either watching the videos or going back to the source readings, and I did both of those things many times.  I seem to remember that for ERM and CFE the study notes by themselves were sufficient a lot of the time, but in this case without larger context I found even using them as review material was difficult without more explanation.  This might be a symptom more of the material than of PAK’s presentation, as there was just a ton of information in seemingly every reading on the syllabus.

I found that my study sessions for FSA exams have been more efficient in short chunks rather than huge blocks (huge blocks worked for prelim exams), so I would do 30-45 minutes in the morning and at lunch and then 60-90 minutes in the evenings.  I didn’t study much on the weekends, because having 3 kids on weekends really saps all your energy!  Even trying to study after the kids went to bed would not have helped very much.

So, armed with that material and a structure, I began my studying in January.  It was rough going the whole way through.  While I found the material interesting, there was SO MUCH of it that it really made it hard to feel like I ever had a handle on it.  There must have been well more than 250 lists I could possibly have tried to memorize, and just so much material that could be tested that it often felt hopeless.  My strategy was to memorize a few formulas, but beyond that not to try to memorize anything specific, just to learn the material as well as possible and be able to understand and apply it.  Now, even with that strategy, every time I opened the study material there was always more and more concepts that could possibly be tested, and there is no way I would ever have been able to learn them all.  Every single week I just felt like I was trying to hold back a waterfall – I was tired from trying and it just kept coming!

So, at no point did I really feel confident.  I had some ideas of what techniques I would like to use for taking notes and reviewing the material, but by the time I finished my read through and initial review, there wasn’t enough time for me to really work with the material.  Keep in mind, I only had 3.5 months between finding out I passed CFE and taking SDM.  If you’re throwing family responsibilities in there and weekends are out for the most part, that isn’t a lot of time.  So, the last few weeks before the exam I started to formulate what I would try to do for next sitting and had a good strategy to pass in the fall.  Unfortunately, I still had to prepare for spring!

I am fortunate to have study time provided by the student program at work.  Most students take the 5 days prior to their exam off from work to study.  I have always done this, and found it very effective. Well, for the first 3 of the 5 days I had a sick kid at home!  While I should still be able to study with a sick kid at home, it was definitely a constant distraction and made it difficult to get into the full mindset or “zone”.  Also, I couldn’t take study breaks like I normally do.  A mid-afternoon trip to the grocery store has always been a good study break for me, and I couldn’t leave the house with a sick kid.

Halfway through the third study day, a coworker of mine who is taking the same exam called and we chatted about how we felt about our chances.  He was feeling positive, but I was not.  I felt like I knew nothing!  Keep in mind, the exam is in 3 days at this point.  He was encouraging, and after he called I decided to try to use one of the methods I was preparing for the fall, which was to take notes on all the sections by hand.  Essentially, extract what I felt was most important from the PAK notes (based on my highlighting and handwritten notes in there) and put it all in a notebook.  2 full days and 30 handwritten pages of notes later, I had given myself and handy mini review book, and had reinforced many of the concepts in an efficient manner.

At this point, I still felt like I didn’t KNOW anything from a memorization standpoint, but that I was pretty familiar with over 80% of the material based on my crunch-time hand written note taking.  If they asked me to apply concepts, I would be in good shape. If they wanted lists from the study material, I would come up short on most.

Well, the exam didn’t ask for a lot of lists to be regurgitated.  It turned out to be application of concepts and a lot of applying concepts to the case study.  My preparation was targeted towards that, and I feel like I got at least somewhere between 60-70% of the points, and quite possibly more than that.  Based on feedback from other students, all of us seem to agree that the exam felt a little bit easy, so we shall see where the pass mark and pass rate end up, but I am cautiously optimistic at this point.  I was able to answer every question with something, even if I thought it really wasn’t 100% correct, and I finished both the morning and afternoon sessions with at least 15 minutes to spare.  This is the best I have felt out post-exam of my 4 FSA exam sittings, so we shall see if that holds up when results are reached.

If the result in July is a pass, the quest is complete!

Passed CFE, on to SDM!

A bit of a late update on this one - I got my result for my second attempt at CFE in January, and I passed with a 6.  I feel like I am very fortunate to have gotten four 6's and no 5's at this point!

I have started studying for SDM, using the PAK online seminar and study guide.  I have been a little slow to get fully into gear, mostly due to "busy-ness" associated with family, but hopefully I can get two really strong months of studying in.  I am finding the material so far to be both interesting but seemingly challenging to learn at a level required for a FSA exam.  I could see some really challenging questions coming out of it asking very specific things, and it would be incredibly difficult to master every reading.  As I mentioned previously (I believe anyway), the only strategy I have developed for upper level exams is just to try to learn everything!  I'm going to keep doing that, and using the flashcards PAK provided as short term refreshes in between times I can make passes through each reading.

I did get a pass for my third and final FSA module, so I only have the DMAC left after this exam.  Wow, it has been a long 5 years!  

Post CFE thoughts

Well, I feel better after taking CFE that I did last time.  I think I got around 58 of the available 100 points.  For my previous 2 FSA exams, I estimated that 54 or 55 percent of the available points was the pass mark, so hopefully I can squeak by on this one.

As for the exam, I felt the morning session was pretty fair, and the afternoon session was pretty rough.  Based on comments online that seems to be a pretty universal feeling.  For the morning session, I felt that if you studied the material you would have a decent grasp of most of the things they were asking for.  In also felt the morning questions were pretty creative approaches to the material and I enjoyed reading and thinking about them.  The afternoon session was not like that.  I thought it was more representative of what a very difficult version of the exam would look like.  I’m not saying it was unfair, but more on the highly challenging level.

So, we shall see how results go.  In the meantime, I’m going to work on my final module and the DMAC, and start to review the syllabus for the next exam once it is released.

If you are waiting on results as well, good luck!

CFE update

It’s been a while since the last update!  I took CFE in the Spring, and had the same types of issues with structuring my studying that I had with ERM.  I just never felt like I had a great strategy except for “learn as much as possible”.  While that is a nice goal to have, it really doesn’t help break down into weekly and daily goals, except for the very basic “Study this section this day” division of material.

I ended up with a 4 on the Spring sitting of CFE.  I don’t quite know how to feel about that. There were two questions I COULD have gotten the points on that would have gotten me to passing.  One was a question that referred to the case study but it never occurred to me that the factor I needed to make my math work was something I had to pull out of the case study.  I was pulling apart the problem back and forth, knowing I could do it, and I never figured out what I was missing.  Right after the exam I asked someone else who took it about the question, and they mentioned that the factor I needed was in the case study.  Doh!  I never even thought to look there, though it should have been obvious.  There was another question that was entirely devoted to a topic I could not recall anything about.  If I had been able to get some points on that question, and get the calculation factor from the case study I would have been very close to passing.

So, the good news is I had a good shot to pass in the Spring, even though I did not.  I don’t know how to feel about that.  Should that give me confidence?  I suppose it should, but given a new set of questions on a new set of topics, I can’t assume I’m starting from a 4 and working my way up, I have to assume I am starting from 0 again, and while it is good to know I scored a 4 once, I can’t assume I will just be able to do that again.

As mentioned above, I still have no idea how to feel about preparedness for these exams.  Oh, how I long for the days when I knew I could do 70% of the practice questions on a prelim!  I feel like I know a lot of the material, but there will always be sections, subsections, lists, etc., that I don’t know yet!  So as I prepare, I always have that feeling like I DON’T know things, which is both discouraging but also motivating as it keeps me focused on trying to learn the next thing.  The only real strategy I have figured out for these exams is to learn as much as possible about everything, which is ok with me as I am genuinely interested in the material, but I am never going to be able to really master every topic and calculation.  To risk stating the obvious, I hope to know enough to score a 6 and be able to move on.

For anyone who is curious, my study strategy for FSA exams has basically boiled down to this:

1. Read the source material
2. Read the study guide
3. Make notecards or review purchased notecards
4. Review past exam questions, noting the types of questions asked and the calculations asked for
5. Try to distill the material into digestible chunks.  For the ERM exam I wrote my own study guide, but I have only done about half of one for CFE – I just don’t find the material as adaptable to writing up on my own.  For CFE, I am going through each section and determining whether it is best served by notecards or just reading the study guide (for sections that are too dense to easily make cards from)
6. Review what I put together in step 5 and continue to review past exam questions I noted as significant in step 4.
7. Use my last bit of available energy to take the exam, crossing the finish line collapsed flat on my face with one hand over the line.  (In my head, this is similar to an image of cartoon character I remember from my younger days, but I can't quite place the memory to find the exact image.)  

13 Days left for me.  Hopefully, all of you who are reading this – both current day and in the future – are finding the motivation to keep working hard until exam day!

Passed ERM Exam, onto CFE!

So I passed the ERM Exam with a 6.  Yay!

Ok, the time to celebrate is over.  I'm going to take Foundations of CFE in the spring.  I'm using TIA as my study material this time around.  I am signed up, and there aren't any videos yet!  There is a study manual though, so that is enough to chew on for now.  The first wave of videos should be available this weekend.

Good luck to all of you who are studying for spring!

First FSA exam thoughts, waiting for results!

I’m awaiting my result for the ERM exam – it will be released tomorrow!  I never provided any additional updates or thoughts on the exam, so I’ll share them while I wait.

I found that FSA exams are very different beasts to prepare for.  For a prelim exam, you get a group of practice questions, keep working on those so you can learn more and more concepts, and you have a pretty good idea when you are ready to take the final exams.  For FSA exams?  No such structure!

As I mentioned in the last post, I finished the reading towards the end of August, and then I had two months left and no real structure (ie get 70% on practice questions, etc).  I found that very difficult to deal with, as I never really knew where I was in my studying.  I ended up both buying flashcards and making my own “study manual”, both of which helped a lot.  When I say I made my own study manual, what I really mean is I took concepts from the texts and flashcards and put the main ideas in my own words.  Doing so really forced me to understand the concept and helped expose weaknesses.

I found the flashcards were really helpful at first, but after a while I couldn’t memorize anymore!  I bought the ACE flash cards (which I liked a lot), and there were about 300 cards.  I was able to memorize the first 60 or so, but after that I just couldn’t memorize additional cards.  I still reviewed the flashcards to try to learn the concepts, but I just didn’t have the capacity to store any more information verbatim.

So, towards the end of September and into October I was very frustrated, stressed, and discouraged.  As I mentioned, with the prelim exams I was always very organized, structured, and had a specific plan.  I couldn’t figure out an organized plan for FSA exams, and it made studying very difficult.  To compound things, given that I was so frustrated, I found it difficult to put time into studying!  I would take certain nights off entirely, or when I did study I would end up quitting earlier than usual just because I didn’t have specific goals/identified weaknesses, etc.  So, my study hours were not what I would have liked.  You might think memorizing flashcards would be a specific goal, but as I said I just couldn’t use that approach after a while.

I would up discouraged, tired, and essentially limping in to the final week.  The only thing that really kept me focused to any degree was the project of making my own manual.  I ended up reviewing all the concepts, thinking about how to structure the information, and using that as my main study document.

The morning of the exam I was resigned to my fate, prepared to take it again in the spring.  I remember sitting in Panera, having a bagel, and taking one last look at my study document to try to absorb what I could, but mostly thinking the document would be a good start for spring studying.

I went to the exam center, and as the exam started I was actually pretty relaxed due to my acceptance of my fate.  As the exam started, I read the questions during the 15 minute reading period and little by little realized I could answer some of the questions.  I started writing furiously, figuring I could at least get some of the points and make a good showing.  As I completed some questions, I would look at the remaining questions and realize for most of them I could provide an answer that would at least get some, if not all, of the points.  I ended up writing until there was 3 minutes left, and felt pretty decent about my exam.  I did end up totally making up answers to a few questions that I knew were incorrect in the hopes of maybe getting a point for getting a small part correct, but I saved those to the end and made sure the answers I was more sure of were completed first.

On the exam itself, there were 80 possible points.  I felt like I had about 38 of them for sure, a good chance at another 17, and maybe I’d pick up a few of the remaining 25.  I have no idea how many I’d need to pass, I’d guess 50 or 55, but perhaps it could be as high as 60 (of the 80).  So, assuming my estimates are correct I should at least have a chance of passing.  We shall see tomorrow!

Going forward, I’m not sure what I would change next time around or how my strategy will change.  I will start working on my own study manual and on flash cards starting from day 1, but it remains to be seen if that will provide more structure and less stress!

Almost an ASA, FSA exam update

I ended up passing MLC with a 7, so I have completed all the prelim exams!  Yay!  And it only took all my free time for 3 years (note sarcasm)!

I still have one VEE I need credit for.  I took the Actex class this summer and am awaiting my grade as I type.  I attended the APC as well, so I should be an ASA within the next couple of months.  I couldn’t even have imagined writing that when I started this blog three years ago.  I guess I am the type of person who puts my head down and does the work without spending a lot of time thinking about the end goal.  Granted, I always know I am working on the end goal and that is what drives me, I just don’t spend a lot of time pondering what it will feel like to be there.  So now that I can start thinking about the ASA, it actually is nice to know all the endless hours of studying pay off and to get there!

Was that enough rest and reflection?  FSA exams are on the docket!  I’ll be taking the ERM exam on Oct. 29.  It is a weird feeling again to not really know how to prepare.  I am almost done with the first pass of the reading, and obviously I need to memorize all the material and really understand how to apply it, but HOW to do that is a mystery to me right now.  I remember this feeling well from Exam P – knowing I wanted to get to a certain goal but not having an idea HOW.

One thing that greatly benefited me was finding someone else in the company taking the exam.  In talking this over with that person, I really figured out that I need to make my own study guide, much like I did for Exam C.  Putting together the notes in my own way will help me internalize the material.  Well, hopefully anyway!