It’s been almost 15 years since I took an FSA exam, so my experience may be nearly invalid. However, I did pass 4 FSA-level exams in 5 attempts, so that may be a reasonable caveat. Here’s my first thoughts:
1. Primary sources are your best bet. I rarely relied on study notes or seminars, because those had been filtered from the original at least once, and were often tuned to what the study note creator or seminar presenter preferred. I can recall one time, studying for a prelim exam, when a coworker and I got in to a discussion about economics. He asked, “Where did you come up with that?” I pulled out the text and pointed to it. He said, “Well, that’s not the way we learned it in my college econ class.” Right, but the exam isn’t based on your college text, it’s based on this one right here that’s on the syllabus. I passed that exam first try, he passed on his third. Evidence? Maybe. Regardless, I like 90% of the time relied on primary sources only, and very rarely bought a study manual.
2. There are no shortcuts. Make a plan that includes plenty of flexible time for your study schedule to adapt to the world around you. The one failure I had was when my exam came only a couple of weeks after a major trip with the family. I thought I would get studying done. I didn’t. That exam also had a lot of lists to memorize. I generally don’t do well with general list memorization. I figured I would just have to go with it to get past that exam. So I did the following:
3. Create your own flashcards. Similar to #1 above, when you do this, you not only force yourself to understand the material, you understand it in a way that makes sense to you. For one FSA exam, I ended up with about 500 double-sided cards, some with mnemonics on one side and the definition on the other for various things I was trying to remember, some with various distillations of concepts that made sense to me and allowed me to solidify the topics through repetition.
4. Analyze the prior exams, not for the questions themselves, but the style of the questions that will be asked. Are there several questions about a particular subject? What are the weights of the subjects? Are there many questions about a particular case study? Is there a trend to ask higher-value, multi-part questions about a particular concept? Then compare that subject to the syllabus - what has not yet been asked? What gets asked every time?
5. Design your own exam. Use the learnings from your analysis to come up with potential questions, following whatever template you’ve identified in #4.
6. Be ready 2 weeks ahead of exam time. If you need a little extra flex time, either because of life stuff, you’ve got some margin. Then taper down and be mentally prepared for the stress of the day.
7. Take the day off work and go golfing (or some other relaxation activity) the day before. You likely won’t learn anything new on the very last day, you’re not going to forget anything in that one day, and you will significantly reduce your stress levels, which will allow your brain to function most effectively.
You’ve probably already done many of these things. If you’d like a face-to-face conversation, I’m happy to talk. My DMs are open.