How I went from "Fail" to "Congratulations!" in about 30 hours

I was literally in the middle of studying for FM yesterday morning when suddenly a text came in on my phone.

“Hello candidate the result of your FM exam is Fail.”

My gut reaction? “What the? Is this a prank?” Only minutes prior I was in conversation with a few coworkers about their experiences with FM and I thought maybe one of them found my phone number somehow and texted me this crazy depressing text. But no! On April 20 I took FM for the first time and on June 7—the day before taking FM again—the SOA decided to inform me of my failure to pass. (Did you read that? “Fail.” Was the capital “F” really necessary?) What a downer. But really, it was so hilarious I went out to my coworkers and showed them the text and we all had a good laugh about it.

Oh, by the way. I passed FM today!

I had it all planned out. I was going to get up, get ready, and drive to the testing center way earlier than 1:00 pm, the appointment time. But as my morning progressed I realized this was prime time to review a practice exam from yesterday and to refresh on a few of the hazier subjects.

I left around 11:15, I think, and got lost. Hold on, that sounds bad. It really wasn’t. I got lost in the sense that I found the right road and drove too far and had Karen help me retrace my steps a bit. After check-in, I ended up starting the exam at about 12:30.

The first half hour was kind of a rush. Problems one and two were lowballs, and then I hit a few medium ones and it kind of continued that way. After that half hour I realized there was nothing to worry about. I was already off to a good start, managing my time well, and things looked familiar. For the remaining two and a half hours, then, I felt cool and calm. (It was also kind of cold in there and I started to ball up in the last half hour.) By the time I selected an answer for question #35, I had little more than seven minutes to spare. I reviewed a few problems I marked and actually changed the answer on one.

Two quotes kept coming back to me throughout the exam. One is from Paul Harmon, my boss.

“It’s better to spend 30 seconds guessing on a question you can come back to than to spend 14 minutes on a question only to realize you’re going to need to guess anyway.”

The second is one of the last things McKay said to me before going to bed last night.

“Don’t spend too much time on any one problem. Just get through it all and mark the ones you want to come back to and then you can go back and spend time on some of them.”

Best advice I could have received, same thing from both of them. It really saved my tail, too. I was able to relax because I answered the ones I knew how to answer and I let the other ones be. Of course, when it finished the computer prompted me to answer a survey about my testing experience, but by then my heart pounded and raced. I answered their questions quickly and without much thought. (Seriously, Prometric? You want me to answer your survey right before I see my test results? Puh-leez.) And then I saw the wonderful word...

“Congratulations!”

They gave me a printout when I left the room. It’s really beautiful if you read it slowly and imagine you just studied for hundreds of hours.

“Congratulations! A preliminary analysis of your test results shows that you were successful in achieving the passing score established by the SOA/CAS/CIA for Exam FM/2 (Financial Mathematics).”

Onward and upward.