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I have 3 suggestions for others working towards fellowship, or even associateship, that have helped me:
Identify your learning style and choose study materials that complement it. TIA is my go-to. Once I left behind the traditional manuals & methods and went with TIA, I’ve been passing all my exams on the first round. I only wish I had switched earlier in my career…I could’ve saved a lot of time and money.
Learn how to study more effectively instead of just getting the hours you think you need. Actuarial Exam Tactics (by Roy Ju and Mike Jennings) helped me develop better study methods and habits. I sailed through high school and most of college without really needing to study, so I never learned how to study effectively when it came to challenging material. This book was one of my better purchases.
Increase reading speed/comprehension with a speed reading course. Udemy has some free speed reading courses that take a few hours to complete and helped me quite a bit. Public libraries also often have free courses, I know my local library does.
I know this is late but since I just went through this I thought I’d share my experience for others. Word did have spell check enabled and autocorrect automatically set up on mine. Autocorrect was more of a hindrance than a help for me.
Most annoying issues with written CBTs (Even though the documentation warned me and I practiced this way)
- Some commonly used shortcuts are disabled while others were not – you cannot bold using shortcuts but you can underline using shortcuts
- Manually switching screens – I caught myself trying to use keyboard shortcuts out of habit
Things I wish I knew before I took my first written CBT exam:
- Ctrl+V never pasted graphs/tables right for me, so I had to use the mouse to paste them into the Word file.
- Staff at the Prometric site are terrible with tech issues. They didn’t know how to fix issues and only offered to move me to another workstation. I tried to get a tech issue report so that it could be sent to the SOA, but couldn’t so I just did the best I could. Luckily I only lost 5 minutes so I didn’t press the issue.
- The exam instructions may not reflect reality. Exam instructions said the workspace shortcut would be on the taskbar and was not. The shortcut for me was on the desktop so I had to minimize the exam windows to get to the desktop.
- There were no horizontal scroll bars when reducing the size of the exam window, so I could see the exam questions PDF, but I could not scroll over to see the time so I had to leave the window maximized.
- I could have had food and drink in my locker to have during a break since we get 15 additional minutes for a break. I just couldn’t access electronics or study material. I just powered through though.
