Hi, good questions! We don’t use competitor materials for legal reasons, so my knowledge of other programs is based on conversations with other people. However, I can certainly answer this from Achievable’s perspective.
The simple answer is no, they do not. FINRA and NASAA are highly protective of their content/questions to preserve the integrity of the exam, so understandably, no one has access to the actual questions. We attend various professional conferences every year, through which we’ve built close relationships with people at these regulatory organizations, whom we can ask for clarification when we aren’t sure to what extent particular topics are tested. But, aside from the published content outlines, there is very little official guidance from the regulators.
At Achievable, we invest enormous time and effort into ensuring our materials are updated. We make hundreds of updates to our courses every month so that as the actual exams shift in focus, our materials continue to stay closely aligned. By comparison, most other vendors only update their materials once or twice a year for major regulatory changes.
We aim to keep our materials concise yet comprehensive. Achievable study programs tend to take about half the time as others while maintaining higher pass rates. There are multiple reasons for this: we put great effort into making the material easy to understand, our adaptive learning platform automatically personalizes the course to you as you study, and we weight our materials appropriately, covering lightly-tested topics lightly.
If you feel you’ve identified errors in our materials, please reach out. We’ll investigate right away and make updates if appropriate. We welcome feedback and the opportunity to improve our materials; I’m sure you’ve noticed the feedback buttons/forms on almost every page of the site.
Achievable has exceptionally high pass rates, with a 95%+ first-time pass for all our courses. We take our pass rates exceptionally seriously; we only succeed as a company when our learners pass their exams.
Although nearly all our customers pass on their first attempt, I continually push to improve our course materials and platform. I founded this company with the mission that everyone who puts in the effort to study should pass. I speak directly with thousands of Achievable customers every year; some have become my close friends. I deeply understand the impact these exams have on people’s lives; to us, our customers are real people, not statistics. I strive to do my absolute best to support everyone in achieving their goals, and work to cultivate this culture throughout Achievable as a whole.