Series 79 Kill Count

Some advice for all  'tweakers' out there doom scrolling this thread and others like it before their exam:

1. Drill as many practice questions as possible before the exam. Questions are your ticket to the promised land. I thought that the textbook while explaining concepts in more detail, was relatively useless. The videos were a little better. The actual wording of the questions on the S79 differs from KM by a noticeable margin, but drilling as many questions as possible helps with word association/pattern recognition on the actual exam.
2. Questions can be super long, which KM does a good job of emulating, and sometimes you can "pick off" the correct answer by reading the last sentence.
3. The questions on the exam are a lot more vague than KM's super niche case-specific questions, but with that being said, you can usually tell which answer is correct because the other three answers are just so wrong/ do not apply at all to anything that the question is asking.
4. Our firm paid for KM virtual classes, and the statistic KM hit us with was "If you score >70% on the benchmark, you have a 99% chance of passing the actual exam." IMO, the Benchmark is HARDER than the Diagnostic 1 but EASIER than the Diagnostic 2. Rip those exams, and then take a look at what questions you missed briefly, wait a week to take the exam you just took again, and then rinse and repeat.
   1. Something to note: it is completely normal to "fail" the KM exams and pass the real thing. You should not be aiming for scores in the high 60s, but if you can not move the needle, I would rest assured that a score of 65% and above gets you in striking distance of a pass. The caveat to these scores, I would argue, is that you are banking on having some sort of "luck of the draw" with the questions that are randomly pulled from FINRA's test bank, meaning, if you are ripping scores in the 60s on the Benchmark, or Diagnostic 1 & 2, you are kind of depending on getting a few softball questions on the real exam to pad your score. Anything above>70% and you have already passed the real exam.
      1. On that note, do not listen to the random posts that go "I got a 72% on my benchmark but still failed the real exam, FINRA questions were so much harder than KM/Kaplan/ChatGPT premium randomly generating questions!!! HR just fired me!!" These people are either idiots (which you are not) or extremely unlucky (which you are not)-- possessing either of these qualities would not have gotten you to where you are now.
5. Put your test date into the KM website to get the most recent key concepts via email. This is a collection of key concepts that apply to questions recently seen on the exam. I read somewhere that KM has recent test takers reach out to them, explain the question, and then provide the key concept that is associated with the answer to that question. You will be able to rip 5-10 questions from this email, easily.
6. KM overpopulates its test bank with math questions, the majority of the exam was on exempt transactions, focus instead on those chapters.
7. Never change answers. Trust your gut instinct.

The 'hardest thing" about this exam is not that the exam is that difficult, it is that it feels more difficult because you know that your job, and part of your personal brand, is on the line. That added pressure you place on yourself clouds your ability to recall concepts and answer questions. You need to find a way to calm yourself down when taking the exam, get into a rhythm, and ask yourself if there is any conceivable way that "answer choice x" could apply, and then do that for all choices on each question. On my exam, for multiple questions, I found that the right answer was so painstakingly obvious that I laughed out loud in the testing center (don't do this you get a lot of nasty looks from the sad mole people that work at Prometric).

IMO, FINRA is not attempting to "weed out" new grads entering the industry, they need people to pass, you just need to trust the KM process and commit to it to see the results.

Visualize pressing submit and seeing the "pass" result every time you are doubting yourself. Go crush it!