I jumped into this right after passing the CFP on my first try so I wasn’t super excited about studying for this and I’m also a little burnt out from it.
I test on April 10th. I didn’t use anything to study except achievable. I’ve taken 6 practice tests and my scores are all in the 50s%. I haven’t used much of my time as I have been finishing them in 60-80 minutes.
I looked to achievable because I want have this done quickly. However, I just feel stuck since other providers I’ve used to study for everything break down your weak areas in more detail and bring you to the reading on it.
I’m not trying to get 100% readiness on this program. I’m just trying to get it done. With that said:
What did you do to hone in on your weak areas?
What is some of the lowest practice exam scores you’ve seen where people have still passed?
It’s rare to see people excited to study for these exams; we get it
I understand that you want to get this done quickly, and the best way to do that is to go through the program as we recommend on the How to get the most from Achievable page:
Set a target exam date using the study planner on your Dashboard
Read through the assigned topics and take the quiz at the bottom of the page
With any additional study time after the day’s reading is completed, take review quizzes from the dashboard
Repeat steps 2 and 3 according to the schedule until all reading material is completed
Take practice exam sections, carefully reviewing everything missed or guessed
Getting to 100% readiness means you’ve demonstrated that you’re highly likely to pass the exam, not that you’ve mastered every concept, so you should be aiming to get 100% readiness.
My recommendation is go to back through the reading material like you’re starting from the beginning, as I noticed you’ve only spent around a minute or two reading each topic! I know this may feel counterintuitive, but there are thousands of concepts that you need to learn to pass this exam. Although the test is only 125 scored questions, it’s semi-random, so you would need to take dozens of tests to see all the different learning objectives. The fastest way to study is just to learn the material from the online textbook, and then use the exams to highlight any weak areas that need additional review.
It is possible to pass only by using exams, but we don’t recommend it since it is a very risky strategy. If you do choose to follow this path (and even if you don’t), it’s crucial that you spend more time reviewing your exams. Everything missed or guessed is something that needs additional review. Completing your exam in 60-80 minutes is a little fast but still good. But you should be spending 3-4 hours after that ensuring that you fully understand every incorrect to ensure you get those questions right the next time.
Thanks Justin- a large part why I didn’t spend much time on some of the reading is because I knew a decent amount from the CFP. & that’s reflected in the quiz at the bottom of each of those pages.
How do I go back and review the topics that I was poor in? With my test coming up, I’m not going to read the entire book over. If I had more time, I’d take this advice.
I see there’s an area to hover over each sub chapter quiz to see your score but it’s very difficult and not very user-friendly. Any chance that I could get a better view of this to see what exactly I need to go back and reread? If you’re able to view this on your end, is it possible to have this emailed to me?
Hi @Megan_Schmidt, when you click on “Review” on your Dashboard, by default the system will prioritize the areas that you’re weakest in. You can customize these areas by clicking on the control sliders icon on the top right of that screen.
Looking at the personalized information on your Practice exams page is a good place to start to identify your weak/strong areas, particularly the “Combined summary”. It looks like you’re doing well in preferred stock and alternative pooled investments, but the rest looks uniformly a bit low. If it was the case that you were just weaker in one of two areas then it’s easy for us to say that you should just re-read those chapters. However, lower scores across the board tend to indicate that the material wasn’t thoroughly learned from the start, so it tends to be less about filling in a couple of holes vs generally re-learning the material.
Thanks- I see that there are different colors but there isn’t a key. Most of the categories for my last exam were green and orange with 4 topics being red. The red categories were lower weighted. With that said, I am not going to re-read sections I am scoring a 70% even though they are orange. It’s clear that there are mostly a subtopic within the chapter I am struggling with.
So, how can we view our weak areas within the subchapter?
Hi @Megan_Schmidt, I’m referring to this “Recent summary” from your practice exams page. Almost all your sections are <60%, including the most heavily weighted ones. It doesn’t seem like there are just one or two subchapters that need review.
Exam questions tend to focus on comprehensive knowledge rather than specific points of trivia, so it’s difficult to map them to any particular part of the textbook. Once you are scoring 70s or 80s, using our review quizzes to identify specific minor weak areas and re-read just those snippets of the text is a reasonable strategy, but at this stage, it seems like an approach more focused around the core concepts would be most beneficial.
Justin- I was aware of what you were asking about before. Thanks for the advice but I am not going to go back and read the whole book. That would be a huge waste of my time since I already reviewed that material AND took all of subchapter quizzes in which most of them I scored 70%-90% on…
This screenshot is not a very good representation as I took a bunch of practice tests last week. I just had a chance to review them this weekend along with my weak areas. This bumped up my score and you can see that I only had “red” scores in four small weighted areas.
Why would I re-read sections that I am scoring a 70% in? Like I mentioned in my last post, it’s clearly specific subchapters topics that I should focus my time.
However, Achievable doesn’t have good interface or customer support so it looks like I will never get my answer. Instead, I will be told… maybe a fourth time… to re-read? lol no.
Hopefully someone can answer my original questions and/or Achievable can show options like other providers on subchapter quiz break down.
Hi @Megan_Schmidt, our goal is to help everyone pass their exams with the least amount of study time - we’re aligned with you on that. However, based on your scores, and seeing the exam you took today was also a 58%, it seems like there is a lot of information to review. Our practice exam scores have a very close correlation to the real exam scores, so if you’re consistently scoring in the 50s on ours, it’s very likely that you’ll score in the 50s on the real exam.
I strive to support every learner as best as I can, so despite feeling this is not an effective way to study, I’ve generated a full export of your performance on our questions by chapter, with direct links to the text. I hope you find this helpful.
