Exam Day Strategy

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ElwoodRoller

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What is everyone’s exam day strategy regarding order? Is it better to not “waste” brain power on a topic like ethics, and leave it to the end, or knock out the easier topics earlier and save the remaining time for more difficult sections?
 
I’m just going to go through each question in order and leave about 30-40 mins remaining to recheck everything. I don’t want to be skipping and jumping around in case I accidentally fill in the wrong bubbles.
 
I usualy have around 60 minutes left each 60 questions. But if i was slower, i’d to my EZ stuff first (i can do Alt and equities in less than a minute per questions). Then i’d have 2h30min for the equivalent of 40 questions.
Just read your quicksheet the morning of the exam and dont forget to study a bit during lunch. If you didn’t get a question on a perticular topic in the AM exam, be sure to know your stuff for the PM.
 
I prefer to start with strongest sections and work my way through them in that order. Keeps me ahead of time, lowers probability of stupid mistakes on my stronger topics due to end of session fatigue, and allows for more time to think about my weaker areas (as I’m usually ahead of time by this point)
 
in order is my preferredt method as well. No overthinking or stupid scantron mistakes (to which i can be prone).
 
In order for me too. I am paranoid about marking the wrong circles if I dont go in order.
 
Read Questions first and search the vignette for answer or other way around? I have heard from some re-takers that the item sets are not structured in order of question like the topic tests are
 
I’ll start with quickest sections (Ethics, PM, Quant, Alt, Econ, Corp Fin maybe) and then move to calculation-heavy ones.
If I see that I’m for longer than 6-7 min on a question, I skip it and return in the end, but note the most likely answer so that I can circle it if I run out of time.
 
Ethics -> Read through the vintage once before going to the questions.
Every other section first: Skim the questions quickly to figure out how many calcs i need to do/what to look out for. If i don’t know or don’t get the excat right answer I’ll pick the closest answer and mark for review. I don’t want to waste time re-calcing everything.
Leaving Econonmics for last because it takes my brain a little while to compute bid/ask and figure out traingle arbitrage and if i get stuck on it I don’t want to waste to much time.
Sums up my strategy.
 
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