When it comes to your final week, SIE exam review should include a few important items. In today’s post, we explore some key tidbits that seem to be a big help for our students.
Final Week SIE Exam Review: Core Topics
In your final week of studying for the SIE exam, there are a few core topics that you want to make sure that you know stone-cold.
Here’s a brief list of what we consider core topics:
- Bond yields (e.g., Nominal Yield, Current Yield, Yield-to-Maturity, Yield-to-Call)
- SEC Rules and Regulations
- Investment Risks
- Options
- Monetary and Fiscal Policy
- Order Types (e.g., Stop Order, Limit Orders, Stop-Limit Orders, etc.)
- Investment Companies (e.g., mutual funds)
- Retirement Accounts and Customer Accounts
Within these core topics, there’s plenty of memorization work to be done. In fact, we see many students that get through this exam by memorizing their way through it.
Note: Just as a heads up, it is much more difficult to get through the Series 7 Exam by attempting to memorize the content, but in the SIE exam it’s much more digestible and possible.
During your last week, make sure that you start with these core topics and have them covered fairly thoroughly before you go into the exam.
Flash Cards or a Study Sheet
We see many dozens of students every year that try to go into the exam without a systematic approach to memorization. In other words, they hope that taking practice questions, and studying will help things “stick”. The reality is that our brains don’t work like that on average. Most of us need constant repetition, or review, to make sure that new concepts work their way into long-term memory.
For this reason I highly encourage you to make sure that you have flashcards or a study sheet to regularly review at least once per day in the last week studying for the SIE exam (or ideally, right from the beginning). The SIE exam difficulty level is high enough without ignoring this key point.
Have an Exam Day Strategy
Most people tend to go into this exam without a strategy. Consider how you answer questions, and how you will review questions already answered if you have time left at the end.
For example, if you have 30 minutes left on your exam after you’ve answered everything, the question is, should you go back over questions that left you unsure? Or, should you double-check answers?
Our suggestion, and what we have seen work is to primarily focus on reviewing questions in which you were originally confident in your answer. The reason being that if you were confident in 50 out of 85 questions, there’s a high probability that at least two or three of the 50 questions were answered incorrectly. Presumably these will be easy points to clean up. You probably already know the answer to these questions, but simply missed a keyword here or there and can easily correct it.
In a nutshell, we highly recommend you take the last week to address some of these very important areas. There are resources here to help. For instance, check out our recent blog on SIE Exam test anxiety. Or, try our SIE video course for a little more help. And of course, reach out for a tutor. Good luck!