The question we ask (and try to answer) today is: Does your FINRA exam breakdown help for your next round of studying?
Below we try our best to answer.
FINRA Exam Breakdown…Not Super Helpful
Quite often we get students that failed their FINRA exam the first time around. A common knee-jerk reaction for many students is to send us a copy of their score, and the breakdown, provided by the testing center.
To many students surprise however, these scores are not particularly helpful or informative to us. There are a number of reasons for this.
Same Sections, Different Questions
When it comes to FINRA exams like the Series 7 Exam, the testing center will often give you a print out of your results broken down into four sections. Each section will include a description of your performance.
There is no numerical metric assigned to your performance, but instead a qualitative measure such as “Very Low Performance”, “Low Performance”, “Borderline Performance” etc. Well, this clearly provides some information to the test taker, but it’s certainly not enough to go on.
The reason why is actually quite simple.
For instance, of the four sections broken out in your results for the Series 7 Exam, each includes a slew of topics. Within these topics, any number of questions could be posed in multiple combinations. If you were to take the exam a second time, there is a high probability that the questions tested in the very same four sections would include a different combination of subtopics tested within each of them.
In other words, there’s absolutely no way to know what sections you did well on, and what ones you did poorly on in the four sections they scored you on. Not only that, but you don’t know what sections might show up next time. Unfortunately this is why the section description of your performance is not particularly helpful to a tutor.
The best you can do is study as hard as possible the second time around. If you decide to use a tutor, then try to get a sense of what specific areas give you the most problems. It won’t take too long to figure it out, but that is usually a better help than the results breakdown from your exam. Good luck!