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I took the FAR exam a month ago and I can honestly say it was one of the most excruciatingly painful experiences of my life. I have never prepared so much for anything before this test. I think I prepared more for this exam than my wife did for the marathon she ran back in 2011. I used Becker to study for the exam. I spent the last two weeks before the exam doing nothing but progress tests and practice tests. For the two weeks before that, I read all the chapters in Becker for a second time after work and on the weekends. This was after spending the entire summer studying the material and watching lectures. By the time exam day was here I was well prepared. I knew all of the material Becker had given me like it was my name.
With the exam so close I was excited. I was confident and I was anxious to pass this test. I was too anxious. I was so anxious to take this test I could not sleep at all the night before. I didn’t sleep. Not even a minute. I laid awake all night watching the hours available for my precious and much needed sleep slip away. By four o’clock A.M I was in a complete panic because I knew every hour I stayed awake was shaving points off my score. The neighbor’s dog started barking around that time and didn’t stop until ten o’clock A.M. I was still wide awake at ten of course. I wanted to kill that poor dog.
It was painful lying awake knowing what this was going to do to me. By ten o’clock the next morning I had already realized I was probably going to fail this test. After all this preparation, I was going to fail the test simply because I wanted it so bad. I was defeated that day. I walked into the testing center feeling like a man who was living his last day on earth. I was dying inside, and I was just trying to get through the day.
I don’t even know how I got the right launch code into the software. I started the exam and the first question was unrecognizable. I swear there were questions I had never seen material for in Becker and it took me sooo long to even read the questions to be able to answer them. Time was slipping away so fast and so slow at the same time. However, by the end of the second multiple choice section I didn’t feel like I was definitely going to fail. I was well prepared, I had a couple hours to go, and I was nailing some of the more difficult questions. I held onto this feeling through the next section as well. With an hour and ten minutes left to go, I confidently opened the simulations.
I took a quick peek at each simulation to see what I was up against and my heart dropped. I was hoping to have mostly easy simulations and maybe a hard simulation or two. There was no easy simulation for me. I only recognized how to do two of the simulations and the research question. The other four questions were completely beyond my comprehension. I was not prepared for these simulations. I did the three simulations I could understand and I started guessing at the remaining four. Time started flying by while I hacked away at the pull downs and at the calculator all the while trying to make some sense of it all. Then, with twenty minutes left and three simulations to go, my calculator froze the whole screen. I couldn’t close the calculator or move it, and I couldn’t see the answers hidden behind it. I panicked right there on the spot.
I called the test administrator over to try to help. He shut down my computer and tried to restart it. He explained to me that the time stopped for me while he rebooted it and there was an extra five minutes added to make up for all the trouble. To me that hardly seemed like enough time to make up for my frustration. As he tried to reboot the computer, it crashed. He moved me to a different computer, and that computer started up where I had left off. I pulled up the calculator to work the problem again, and again it froze the screen. I was in full panic mode as I got the administrators attention again. He fussed with it a bit and after a minute or so he handed me a tiny manual calculator and told me to just use that.
After that I pretty much just started filling numbers in and pulling down boxes just to keep from leaving the questions empty. At least if I put something there was a chance to accidentally get some questions right. I already knew I was going to fail, but I had to try. For the last minute of the exam I frantically pulled down boxes on the last simulation. I couldn’t get a bunch of the numbers in for that last sim. I didn’t even complete the exam. I was crushed. As I left the testing center I was handed an email address to the NASBA so I could inform them of my troubles. The NASBA told me I would need to retest because they could not process my exam. So after everything I had just been through, I would not even get a score for my exam. I was going to have to do this all over again. My heart was completely broken.
Fast forward a couple weeks during which I never heard back from Prometric to schedule my retest. It turns out I had given the NASBA the wrong section ID number and that is why they couldn’t score my exam. I was finally told to wait for my score and if I didn’t pass FAR they would evaluate my trouble to see if I should be retested. I was completely confident I had failed this exam. But still, I now had a glimmer of hope. Maybe I somehow passed despite this horrible experience.
For the next week, I waited anxiously for my score. As I got closer to the release date I started getting more hopeful until I had almost fooled myself into believing I was going to pass. I waited until the middle of the day on the 24th and checked my score during lunch from my desk at work. I scanned the results for signs that I failed the test, but I could not find anything that said fail anywhere. Somewhere i picked out the number 83 and it slowly sank in. I had somehow passed FAR with an 83 despite a frozen calculator, no sleep, and simulations that didn’t make any earthly sense to me! I really must have nailed the multiple choice. I have read on here about how people are always sure they failed the exam only to find out they scored pretty high. I can honestly say this is true for me too. 83 was out of my reach in my wildest dreams considering I didn’t even complete the exam.
I am so relieved to have that experience behind me for now. I just can’t wait to do it three more times.
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