6/15/2012 Entering the review stage
Finishing chapters 15 to 17…
The good news is that these last three chapters are comparatively short, so I’ve been able to work through them in record time. Chapter 15 on operational and enterprise risk management was the most relevant for me, having a treasury role. Chapter 16 was very broad in its discussion of policy creation and procedures. In fact, I can’t anticipate how any test questions will be formulated for this material. Chapter 17 was very IT focussed and thus technical – and although this may be useful, it doesn’t make for the most interesting reading.
… And starting final review
Now I’ve finished reading all the textbook material. Completing this so quickly has given me a temporary sense of relief: I’ve still got five full weeks for review. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much prep time for a test, so I feel as though I’ve got a strong advantage. I wrote the module 6 online review test with very little prep, and got a cool 70%. I’m not overly happy with that score, as chapters 15 to 17 are definitely the simplest chapters. Because they are weighted quite low for the test, I’m not too worried, but I think I will have to invest more time reviewing these final chapters than I’d hoped.
Now that I’ve spent a lot of time using the AFP Learning System, I’ve realized that the review tests could be a lot more useful if they provided explanation as to why incorrect answers are incorrect. The answers explain why the correct answer is correct, and reference the relevant section in the textbook – which is great, but this is sometimes not sufficient to also explain why the other choices are incorrect. I found that the explanations for the correct answers were well done, but in some cases I still didn’t understand why the answer I chose was wrong.
Obviously, I’ve been devoting a lot of time to studying lately. After a few weekends staying in, my wife and I have finally abandoned our crazy attempt at taking one day a week off from work and studying. Now we just take a few hours here and there. She says it’s not a good sign when a trip to the grocery store is our way of taking a night off! Her master’s dissertation is due the week before the CTP test – so in that sense, the timing worked out well because neither of us is resentful of the other’s workload; in fact, I think we’ve each been more understanding. However, it also means neither of us have time for anything else, like cooking or cleaning. We’ll just keep putting all of that off for another month or so.
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