Taking one of many possible FINRA, NASAA, or CFA Exams? If so, it’s probably unclear how many practice questions you should be doing on a regular basis to help sufficiently prepare for the exam. Some friends will tell you that they passed by studying for less than a month, while others took much longer.
In today’s post, we will try to give you a general sense of what you should do for different exams based off of what we see from most students. What we have found may not surprise you, but it should inform you.
Shorter Exam, Fewer Questions
When it comes to determining how many practice questions you should take, consider the number of questions on the exam.
For instance, for exams like the Series 63, Series 6, or SIE Exam, all of which have well under 100 questions total on their actual exam, students seem to do quite well (assuming their scores are also progressing well) with somewhere between 40 and 80 questions per day.
This can be any combination of doing a full practice exam, or doing an equivalent amount of questions, but more targeted studying in specific areas.
When filling in your knowledge gaps, this ladder approach is best. If you typically do around 60 practice questions per day, then on days where you are not doing a full practice exam, it might make sense to do something like 15 questions from four different topics that are causing you problems.
Alternating between full practice exams, and more targeted studying, is typically the best approach in our view.
A Lot of Content? Do A Lot of Questions
When it comes to the large exams such as the CFA exam, Series 7 Exam, Series 79 Exam, Series 66 Exam, among others, practice questions are often the secret sauce – and doing a lot of them.
For exams where you can expect to take well over 100 questions from a broad curriculum, you should expect to do close to 100 questions per day to prepare.
From a scheduling perspective, this may seem like a lot. For instance from Monday to Friday, you may be only able to squeeze in 50 to 80 per day if you have a very busy work life or personal life. That said, try to make it up on weekends if possible. Target somewhere around 150 questions per day on the weekend.
The most important reason why you want to approach these long exams with so many questions is because need to be regularly seeing as many topics as possible, in as little time as possible. In other words, juggling.
In the final few weeks of studying for the CFA Institute‘s notoriously difficult exam, we recommend taking this to the extreme. If you can study at least 3 hours per day, then try one hour per topic, so that you are hitting three topics per day each. How many practice questions you will be able to cram in during the week will determine how frequent you are “reviewing” topics, and keeping them fresh.
There are some topics that tend to slip out of students minds quicker than others. For the Series 7 Exam for example, this is especially true of the Options section. Many students we work with at Professional Exam Tutoring find that without doing questions on challenging subtopics, like Options Spreads, they have to relearn it when they again come across it.
How Many Practice Questions Are Enough?
Although there is no definitive answer for each person, the above seems to work for the majority of the hundreds of students we see every year. For more answers to your questions feel free to reach out. And, good luck on your exam!