My 2018 Series 7 experience

I took and passed the FINRA Series 7 exam this morning 6-1-2018 and used Kaplan exclusively to prepare. I studied for 4 weeks and sat in on their live class for the full 4 days, leaving myself a week to do practice tests until I was blue in the face. Having very little knowledge of the subject matter going in I knew I was not going to be able to “wing it” and devoted a full 8 hours a day to study including a few hours on the weekends. The “Mock Exams” provided in Kaplan’s Q-Bank seemed to be a good bellweather for a passing score on the exam. I took 12 Q-Bank “Mock” exams in addition to their “Practice” and “Mastery” exams. My lowest score was a 76 with an average score of 82 and a high of 87. I highly recommend reading all of the material. While, in the past one could pass this absolute beast of an exam (the volume of testable material is daunting and time consuming) just by taking practice tests repeatedly, I don’t recommend that route unless you have a comprehensive understanding of the wide variety of products available and how they apply to a given person’s goals and objectives. The exam is weighted heavily toward suitability, like 55%-60% of the questions, demanding you draw on your knowledge of taxation, law, and ability to compare and contrast each product’s specific features in order to select the ‘best’ recommendation from a list containing two to three ‘suitable’ investments...That’s where the practice tests let me down, not enough questions requiring me to abstract from my product knowledge and apply it to a scenario. I was prepared with the latest fiscal policy changes and had been scoring high 80’s on the options and bonds portion of the practice tests which turned out to be the easiest portion of the 7 after putting in the time to understand them but there were only ~35-40 questions requiring option/bond math. All-in-all I got an 84% on the 7 but I feel like if I had been scoring any lower than 79% on a given topic in the test prep I could’ve easily slipped below the 75% mark into “maybe I’ll fail” territory. If you put in the time to really know each product and its features in addition to knowing options, bonds, treasury products, and CMO’s/GNMA inside and out you’ll do fine. Hope my two cents is valuable in your quest to achieve your goals. Good Luck!