I'd like to introduce these tips with a disclaimer: I do not intend these notes to be prescriptive for every student. Instead, I've tried to think about what advice I would have given myself, someone who generally struggled to pass exams and heard all the tropes about how you just had to put in the time, just had to work through lots and lots of problems, just had to push through even when you didn't fully understand a concept.

If you are finding that advice similarly unhelpful, I hope that my advice helps break you through to other side.

General Exam Tips

1. Find a routine.

Routines are just a physical version of a habit. And forming habits means that you will be much more likely to sustain the activity for a longer stretch of time. The routine can be as general or as specific as you want, but I recommend making location part of that routine - someplace that when you're there, you are in the Study Zone and nothing else.

2. Use your strengths and work with your weaknesses.

Do you like making up practice problems? Are you an awesome note-taker? Maybe your special skill is working through proofs to understand a concept better. Or you like talking about and teaching material to other people and can form a study group.

Similarly, what are you bad at? Focusing on long stretches of written or video instruction? Break up the monotony with a practice problem connected to the material you've just reviewed. Keeping track of the bigger picture? Use a dedicated notebook to write up key concepts from each chapter or study manual section and review regularly. Staying committed to study time? Install a task-focusing app (I use StayOnTask) that periodically checks in to make sure you've still got your eye on the prize.

Whatever it is, lean hard on your strengths and work around weaknesses instead of following a prescriptive routine. It takes a bit of self-reflection but it will really benefit you in the long run.

3. Know that you already have everything you need to pass.

After the obvious attainment of study materials, have confidence in your abilities - passing exams is not reserved for the absurdly intelligent. If you're interested in being an actuary, you already have the aptitude and drive to pass exams. Passing is an exercise in perserverance and knowledge and less about inherent intelligence or cleverness.

Specific Exam Tips

Exam 1/P

If this is your first exam, as it is for many actuarial students, you may fall into a false sense of comfort by passing this one easily. While the concepts are complex and the actual mathematics isn't easy, there are only so many ways to ask all the "tricky" questions, and working through practice problems will help you memorize those tricks - which is not the case on other exams.

That being said, the key to passing this exam is definitely practice problems. The SOA has a long set of problems to work though for free, which is all I used to study on top of a college course that aligned with the material. If you are currently an actuarial science major sitting for a similar course, it may also be the only additional material you'll need as well. For extra assurance I highly recommend ADAPT from Coaching Actuaries.

Exam 2/FM

I started my notes on Exam 1/P with a warning because it is what I would have needed to hear going into the second actuarial exam. Formulas and memorization will only get you so far on all actuarial exams henceforth. Instead I highly recommend understanding the concepts behind each formula and how it is derived (although I do not find it necessary to learn proofs, etc, - just a high-level, explanation-based understanding as opposed to a formula).

The key to Exam 2 and its second cousin once-removed, the life contingencies portion of 3L/MLC, is that the concepts build on one another, and pure mastery is required before moving on to the next piece. I highly recommend spending more time doing a complete review of each chapter and working many, many problems before moving on to the next chapter. This advice goes against the "first pass, second pass, third pass" philosophy of many actuarial students, where the material is cyclically reviewed and expanded on each re-read.

Exam 3F/MFE

The concepts and breadth of material on this exam are particularly challenging. Many students find it to be the hardest of the preliminary exams, and I would generally agree. My key piece of advice for this exam is to find study materials that make sense to you, not necessarily what others are using. For me, this was the Actuarial Brew study manual on my third attempt. I had already worked through the ASM manual and its practice problems through two failed attempts, and I still wasn't fully understanding several concepts. The way Actuarial Brew's manual is organized and written made so much more sense to me than ASM.

Actuarial Brew also offers these spectacularly splendid solutions, for free, to the SOA past exams and practice problems. The difficulty level markings of these solutions, on top of actually helpful explanations, were key to my success. I plotted out the difficulty levels by question and aimed to score 100% on anything Level 3 or below, 90% of Level 4 difficulty, and 50% of Level 5 difficulty. This was a traceable and easy to measure goal that really helped steer my studies, instead of getting unreasonably frustrated when I'd get caught on an extremely difficult problem.

Exam 3L (Now 3ST and 3LC)

I'm not going to comment on SOA's exam MLC because frankly, I did not take the exam and they have dramatically changed its structure since it more closely tracked with 3L. But the majority of life contingencies material is covered on both exams, and my tip for this exam are centered on that.

Life contingencies was my poorest performing subject in college coursework, so I had some psychological barriers to get over on this exam. But boiled down, life contingencies is just financial math with an extra probability component. So I highly recommend tackling this material in much the same way as financial math - one chapter at a time, very carefully, and with LOTS of practice problems before even thinking about moving on to the next chapter.

... more notes coming soon on Exams 4 and 5!