Practice exams are one of the best study tools for professional exams. Research on retrieval practice keeps finding that testing yourself helps you remember more over the long run than rereading or taking notes.
I've taken a lot of practice exams across the actuarial exams and the CFA levels, and the biggest thing I learned is that how you use them matters more than how many you take. Most candidates take too many without reviewing them, wait too long because they don't feel ready, or treat the score as pass or fail instead of information about what to study next.
Two findings from learning research explain why they work. Pulling something out of memory strengthens it much more than rereading it, and every question on a practice exam is a chance to do that. You also remember things best when you practice in the same format you'll be tested in, and reading a textbook is a very different task from answering multiple-choice questions against a clock. So practice exams aren't only for checking whether you're ready. They're one of the most effective ways to study.
When to start and how to take them
Most candidates wait until they feel ready. I'd take your first practice exam before that, once you've covered a good share of the syllabus and have time that week to review it properly. You'll do badly on the topics you haven't studied yet, and that's fine. When you review, keep those misses separate from the rest. A miss on a topic you haven't covered just tells you it's still ahead of you, while a miss on a topic you have covered tells you what you've forgotten or are applying wrong, and that's what you can fix now. An early practice exam shows you those real gaps (not the ones you assume), gets you used to the format and pacing, gives you a baseline to measure progress against, and gets you recalling the topics you've already covered. If a full exam plus its review won't fit in your week, a shorter timed set from the topics you've covered is a fine place to start. If you wait until you've covered everything, you go weeks without that feedback.
How often depends on how long the exam is, how many hours you have each week, and whether you've finished reviewing the last one. I wouldn't start a new practice exam until you've gone through the previous one and fixed what it turned up. That usually means spacing them out early on and taking them closer together near the exam, when there's less left to fix from each one and your hours allow it.
Take them under real conditions, or they're worth a lot less. Set a timer and don't pause it. Close your notes and formula sheets. Do the whole exam in one sitting, since stamina matters on a 3-hour exam like SOA Exam P or the 4.5-hour CFA exam. Use the calculator you'll have on exam day, like the BA II Plus for the CFA, or practice with an on-screen calculator for the CPA. And don't check answers as you go. On the real exam you'll hit questions you're unsure about and have to move on, so practice doing that.
Reviewing a practice exam
Budget time for the review before you take the exam, because the review is where you work out what to fix. How long it takes depends on how many questions you missed and why, and you'll need time after it to actually fix things. I'd go through it in four steps.
First, sort every wrong answer by why you missed it: you didn't know the concept, you knew it but applied it wrong, you set it up right and made an arithmetic mistake, you misread something in the question, or you rushed or ran out of time. Each of those needs a different fix.
Second, go back over the questions you got right by guessing. Those are knowledge gaps too, and they deserve the same review as the ones you missed.
Third, look for patterns by topic. If you missed 4 out of 5 bond questions and only 1 out of 6 annuity questions, you know where to focus next.
Fourth, write down two or three specific things to do, like "practice 20 more bond amortization problems," "review the foreign tax credit conditions" or "spend no more than 4 minutes on D1 questions."
Reading your scores, and mistakes to avoid
One score doesn't tell you much. It moves around depending on which questions came up, so look at the trend across several exams. Rough targets I'd aim for on practice exams, taken under real conditions:
- SOA exams (P, FM and so on): 70% or better, consistently
- CFA Level I: 70% or better
- CFP: 75% or better
These are my rules of thumb, not cutoffs any exam body publishes, and practice exams from different sources aren't equally hard. CPA doesn't fit this kind of target at all. The AICPA reports scores on a 0 to 99 scale with 75 to pass, and it says that score isn't a percentage correct, so a practice percentage doesn't convert to a CPA score. For CPA, look at whether your scores under real conditions keep improving from one exam to the next.
Expect your scores to stall and then jump. Going from 40% to 60% usually feels fast, then you'll feel stuck for a few exams, and then you'll suddenly be at 70% or better. That flat stretch is normal.
A few common mistakes:
- Taking a lot of exams without reviewing them. Answering the questions is good recall practice, but you only find out why you missed one, and fix it, by going back through the exam.
- Only taking practice exams. They show you your weak spots, and topic drilling fixes them. If your hours allow, one rhythm is a practice exam at the weekend, the review in the next day or two, then topic drilling on what it turned up for the rest of the week, with a few of your older misses mixed back in to check they've stuck.
- Retaking the same exam. Your second score gets inflated because you recognize the questions, so use questions you haven't seen.
- Avoiding practice exams because you're afraid of the score. A low score is the most useful information you can get, since it tells you where to focus.
On FreeFellow, timed practice exams are part of Fellow, with scoring, detailed solutions and analytics by topic and difficulty after each one. Mixed practice is free and can pull questions you haven't seen yet from your exam's bank, out of 45,000+ questions across 40 credentials.