I am now just over a week from my exam date.  I spent the weekend sick and did not study as much as I would have liked to.  It’s getting down to the wire and I am terrified that I will run out of time without having a thorough understanding of the material in the book.  By this point I was supposed to be comfortable with all the information in the book and just be focusing on the calculations. There is still quite a bit in the book that I don’t understand.  One positive point is that the when I have practiced the calculations they are coming to me easier than I thought they would.  I still remember many of them from college classes so the practice has been more of a refresher for me.

Yesterday, I practiced on the sample exam questions in the CTP exam preparation guide.  I answered 70 questions and only got half of them correct which is terrifying.  I am hoping that I did so poorly just from lack of focus with being sick and that I am really not that clueless! 

I am still having trouble with the same areas I wrote about in my last entry.  I had a terrible time with a sample question that was asking about currency exchanges.  I am comfortable doing the calculation for converting an amount of foreign currency into dollars.  However, there was a sample question regarding the interest rate of a currency being higher than the rate of another currency and you are supposed to answer whether it is trading at a premium or discount in the futures market. This is such a foreign concept to me that I just can’t grasp it.  Unfortunately, this material makes up somewhere between 8 and 13 questions* on the exam so I’m going to focus a large part of time this evening reading this over again in the book. 

If all goes according to plan I will focus on studying this for about six hours between now (Monday) and Thursday.  I have taken Friday off work to study.  I will spend a good part of Saturday studying.  Sunday, I am hoping to study a little, but spend a majority of the day relaxing with my family.  The exam is Monday and I hope to go into it with a clear head.  This was one piece of advice that I read in the study tips provided in the CTP preparation guide that I really hope to stick to.  The advice was to spend the day before the exam day trying to relax and clear your head instead of trying to spend your final hours cramming information into your brain. 

*editor's note:  For more information on the number of questions on the exam per chapter of the ETM, see page 3 of the CTP Preparation Guide.