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Exam Aftermath

January 28th, 2016
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Now that the January sitting has ended, I want to think about what to do next. If you passed, then congratulations! But now that means moving on to the next exam. P and FM should be your first two preliminary exams as they are easiest, then MFE is next easiest. So if you haven’t yet taken FM, you should tackle that next, while if you have, you should move on to MFE.
But what if you got bad news? The first thing to do is to think about why you failed. I often ask people whether or not they ran out of time — those who did often need improvements in many areas and need to work lots of practice problems. Those who didn’t are more likely to have specific areas of weakness that need practice and improvement. So if you are in that situation, you want to figure out what those weak areas are.
You now get a partial score breakdown of how you did on the different areas of the syllabus, which they label as General Probability, Univariate Probability, and Multivariate. In terms of the seminar material, general probability corresponds roughly to A.1, A.2, and lesson A.4.1, while univariate is A.3, the rest of A.4-A.6, and all of Section B, and multivariate is section C. Unfortunately, even If you score ‘low’ on one area but not the other two, then you only have a vague description of your troubles and need to refine it a bit. To do this, you can work some sample exams or look at your old practice problem scores and see if there are lessons that leap out as needing improvement. The best situation is to be able to narrow it down to a few very specific topics, such as struggling with combinatorics, or conditional moments, or normal approximations. Then between now and your next exam, you want to work a lot of problems on those areas and try to improve on them the most. Just don’t forget to also occasionally work other review problems on general topics as well, and also make sure to redo the practice exams at some point.
One final thing you should do now while the exam is still relatively fresh is to write down what you remember of the questions you struggled with on the exam. You can come back to those notes closer to the exam date to remind you of some things to focus on, plus writing those down may help you figure out what some of your problem areas are.
Whatever your result was, good luck on your next exam.

Now that the January sitting has ended, I want to think about what to do next. If you passed, then congratulations! But now that means moving on to the next exam. P and FM should be your first two preliminary exams as they are easiest, then MFE is next easiest. So if you haven’t yet taken FM, you should tackle that next, while if you have, you should move on to MFE.

But what if you got bad news? The first thing to do is to think about why you failed. I often ask people whether or not they ran out of time — those who did often need improvements in many areas and need to work lots of practice problems. Those who didn’t are more likely to have specific areas of weakness that need practice and improvement. So if you are in that situation, you want to figure out what those weak areas are.

You now get a partial score breakdown of how you did on the different areas of the syllabus, which they label as General Probability, Univariate Probability, and Multivariate. In terms of the seminar material, general probability corresponds roughly to A.1, A.2, and lesson A.4.1, while univariate is A.3, the rest of A.4-A.6, and all of Section B, and multivariate is section C. Unfortunately, even If you score ‘low’ on one area but not the other two, then you only have a vague description of your troubles and need to refine it a bit. To do this, you can work some sample exams or look at your old practice problem scores and see if there are lessons that leap out as needing improvement. The best situation is to be able to narrow it down to a few very specific topics, such as struggling with combinatorics, or conditional moments, or normal approximations. Then between now and your next exam, you want to work a lot of problems on those areas and try to improve on them the most. Just don’t forget to also occasionally work other review problems on general topics as well, and also make sure to redo the practice exams at some point.

One final thing you should do now while the exam is still relatively fresh is to write down what you remember of the questions you struggled with on the exam. You can come back to those notes closer to the exam date to remind you of some things to focus on, plus writing those down may help you figure out what some of your problem areas are.

Whatever your result was, good luck on your next exam.

Dave Uncategorized

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