IFoA study technique

2025-05-26

I was fortunate enough to pass my final IFoA exam last year and I thought I'd share my general strategy in the last exams. Previously I had relied heavily on Anki, but after failing one of the later (essay-based) exams I decided to change my approach radically. It can be summed up as follows.

  1. Nothing matters more than practising the skill you actually want to master. That skill is answering questions. Genuinely if you had to choose between only reading notes or only doing practice questions choose the latter.
  2. Therefore do as many questions as possible. At a minimum this includes all the CMP end-of-chapter problems and several past papers.
  3. This part is key: repeat problems over and over again until you get 100% of the points every time. Revisit the problems you did yesterday and repeat this process. Keep repeating until the day of your exam. It feels crazy but you'd be amazed how poorly you can do on a problem you read all the answers to just yesterday.
  4. That sounds like a ridiculous amount of work but it's not as bad as it seems. Because you're repeating problems it's ok if you get basically 0% on your first attempt. Just look at the answers and try again immediately. Memorise what you can and keep repeating until you've got all the points. ("Look, Cover, Write, Check", if you've heard of that technique before!) Don't spend a lot of time on each attempt: I would just jot down a few key words for each point rather than full sentences, for example. The important thing is the repetition rather than any particular attempt. (I literally don't bother with exam conditions until the exam itself.)
  5. Don't feel bad that you're just studying to answer questions rather than understand. If you practice questions enough, even if just memorising, the understanding will come to you anyway. It's quite satisfying when it clicks – and its real understanding too rather than just reading something and feeling like you probably get it.
  6. For the notes, I would say read them once over as quickly as possible, not writing anything down. Basically just get to doing problems as fast as you can. (For retakes I wouldn't even bother reading the notes.) Mainly they're useful to go back to if something isn't clicking in the problems for you.
  7. If you want to compliment this approach the "revision materials" booklets from ActEd give you a short question for every single paragraph in the core reading. If you commute you can easily incorporate a couple questions in your head every single day. Following this technique would essentially mean you'd have all the core reading memorised, which should be a pretty big help in an exam.
  8. Finally exam technique: make sure to write in bullet points under headings. The examiners like "structured answers" like this and they're not really wrong. It makes you broaden your focus while still giving a bit of detail.

Naturally I haven't tried this technique for the earlier (more maths-heavy) exams, but it does work well for the later ones at least. That much I can vouch for.