@Rob - thanks so much for your great insights! Congratulations on your success! In regards to the test questions, people have a wide variety of experiences on the SIE exam. It sounds like you were given a really tough exam, which happens fairly often. We model our questions after publicly available information, like the FINRA SIE practice exam. Unfortunately, it seems the FINRA practice exam was very different from your exam questions as well.
A relatively unknown aspect of FINRA exams is the fact each exam is “scaled” for difficulty. Meaning, some people take very easy exams, while some people take very difficult exams (sounds like this was your experience). This is directly from FINRA’s website:
The passing score for the SIE is 70 (on a scale of 0 to 100). This test score is placed on a common scale with all other candidate test scores for that exam and statistical adjustments are made to the score to account for slight variations in the difficulty that may exist among different sets of exam questions. This method allows for a fair comparison of scores and ensures that every candidate is held to the same passing standard regardless of which set of exam items they received.
In plain terms, FINRA takes the difficulty of each person’s exam into consideration when providing the final score. You may have actually scored below a 72 in terms of “real” grade, but were given a pass due to the difficulty of your exam. We don’t know the level or amount each exam is scaled as FINRA keeps this information closely guarded. Regardless, a very common form of feedback we receive is “the real exam was very difficult, but I passed!”
In the face of adversity and a very difficult exam, you still did what was necessary to pass. Congratulations again!