With the SIE exam two weeks away, how would you prioritize your limited time? Today, we give you our best recommendations based off of what we see works for the most students.
SIE Exam Two Weeks to Go
First things first, with only two weeks to go, you want to be sure to have finished reading the entire textbook. Therefore, for the two weeks, practice questions (and reviewing definitions/flash cards) should be your focus.
Ideally leaving yourself between two and three weeks for practice questions is best. Our top recommendation for SIE practice questions is Securities Training Corporation (STC). They have a set of eight practice final exams, which in our experience tend to reflect scores you are likely to achieve on the actual exam (although exact questions and their wording may differ).
We highly recommend going through these practice exams twice. Specifically working through practice exam 1 through 8, and then starting again 1 through 8 a second time.
Where Should Scores Land?
After making it through these practice questions, we encourage our students to go and take the exam if their scores are in the low 80% range. As of this writing, we have never had a student fail at the upper end of that range, and seen very few students fail reaching scores in the high 70% range.
To be sure, STC also offers a “Greenlight” exam. This exam is notoriously harder than their practice exams. However, even students that we see score above 65% on this exam tend to succeed on the actual SIE exam.
In other words, falling below the 70% threshold does not predetermine you to failure.
What Else Should I Do?
With the SIE exam two weeks away, also be sure to review your flashcards, or study sheet every other day at a minimum. There are a lot of definitions that you need to know for this exam. And, the ones you should review with two weeks to go are the ones that you are having the most trouble remembering.
Try memorizing at least 3 to 5 definitions per day, until you know them well. Follow up on subsequent days by reviewing the previous day’s definitions. This review will pound those definitions into your long-term memory which is extremely important to succeed.
Overall, practice exams and studying definitions should be your total focus for the last two weeks of studying. We only recommend that you go back and revisit the textbook if there are very specific passages that you need to review. If you follow this approach, and achieve the scores mentioned above on your practice exams, you should be set for success. If you need more help feel free to contact us. Good luck!