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I can provide some really general advice, but as many of us learned, grading can be so variable that whatever I mention here might not necessarily be useful. Also, apologies in advance if some of the things I mention sound super rudimentary and obvious, but I think they sometimes get overlooked as we stress over our written answers.
1. Make sure you meet length guidelines. If there’s anything on the prompt that suggests how long an answer should be, make sure you fit your response accordingly. I think it’s much easier to go over than under, and I got dinged for EMA5 for having a response that was too long. If you’re finding yourself running long, find a way to distill your answer down to the main points. You can do this through things like bullet pointing and clear section headers. Also, I’m guessing there’s probably some attempt by the SOA to force us to write our memos and documents to be somewhat like something we’d type up for our business principals and stakeholders, so (some) graders would probably like to see concise answers.
2. I had success when adding a lot of citations, probably more than I needed. Any concepts that you read about in the required readings can be stated matter-of-factly so long as you use proper citations. This can help reduce the length of your write-up because now you don’t have to provide a drawn-out explanation of what you’re claiming: some author of the required reading already laid out the evidence for you. I think citations have the added benefit of showing you’re applying what you learned. Cite the textbooks, PDFs, and slides in the modules.
3. Similar to the above, find ways to apply the main lessons from the module(s) where you can. I tend to think that the graders prefer to see this level of application and that answers don’t read like they were written by someone who skipped all the readings and went straight to the end of the modules to open the EMA.
4. One piece of advice I’ve gotten is to word your responses in a way that makes it clear you’re answering the question. Some feedback I’ve received is that graders can be like your business stakeholders, and if you’re unlucky, your grader won’t try very hard to find the answer the grader is looking for and just fail you. I think this is where headers and bullets can be helpful.
