CIA Exam Tips and Study Strategy

Being comfortable with the look and feel of the CIA exam will help relieve exam day stress. Additionally, knowing how the exam interface works will keep you from wasting valuable time when you sit for the exam.

The CIA exam is not an exam to cram for. You’ll need to really understand the topics in order to pass, and the best way to do that is to routinely review topics as you progress through your studies. This will take a topic from memorized to mastered and ensure that you have no trouble remembering material on exam day.

Be sure to regularly check in on your study progress and compare it to your study plan. If you’re falling behind, try to figure out why that is and adjust your plan accordingly. It isn’t a problem to adjust your schedule to account for needing longer to learn a tricky topic or having less time to study in a week than you’d thought.

The most important part is that you keep a plan and hold yourself to it. It is much better to adjust your plan than it is to abandon it completely.

Sitting down for 8 hours of studying is demanding, and it doesn’t work all that well long term. It is much better to break that studying up into more manageable portions throughout your day. Study for an hour, take a short break (15-30 minutes), and then take a quiz on the topic you were studying. Then go back to another hour of study/review.

Breaking your studies into two-hour blocks will actually improve your long-term memory of topics. So even if you need to fit 8 hours of studies into one day, be sure to take a break every few hours.

Give yourself a reward as you meet milestones in your studies. Whether it’s a special meal or a night out, giving yourself small rewards as you complete your studies will help keep you motivated. Write down your rewards on your study calendar so you have something to look forward to.

Of course, passing an exam part is also a milestone, and a special reward should be considered for that accomplishment. Give yourself a well deserved, but small, study break before starting your next part. Using the thrill of passing one exam to motivate you to pass the next will help you get ahead in your studies!

Answer explanations are the biggest value-adding benefit that multiple-choice questions provide. It is important to know why an answer is right or wrong in order to make sure you’re learning the appropriate lesson from the question.

Sometimes you might select the right answer for the wrong reason or answer a question that isn’t actually being asked (incorrect answer choices are designed to capitalize on common mistakes), so take a moment to review the answer explanations once you’ve completed your quiz.

If you start memorizing questions, you’re wasting your time. The CIA exam is non-disclosed, so the questions you see during your review will be different from your actual exam. Use a large test bank and randomize the answer choice order so you’re successfully engaging with the concepts and not simply answering by rote.

NOTE: It isn’t good enough to use a provider with a large bank of questions if most of them are on the same few topics. Make sure you have access to complete CIA content coverage. Many review providers allow you to select very specific topic areas, so be sure that the number of the questions in every area is large enough to provide variety.

Avoid creating quizzes that only test the topics you most recently learned. Including content from areas you’ve already completed will improve your quiz variety and deepen your understanding of the topics.

Studies show that the best way to master a topic is through routine exposure over an extended period of time. Basically, preparing over a long period of time (e.g., weeks) is better than taking a lot of tests within a short period of time (e.g., hours or days).

Don’t wait to practice your time management strategy until right before you sit for the CIA exam. If you monitor the time spent on your practice quizzes, you’ll learn to speed up your test-taking abilities and become comfortable answering questions at your exam-day pace.

The best way to practice is to firmly limit the time spent on a 20-question quiz to 30 minutes. Once that time elapses, put your pen down and start your review. This may seem hard at first, and you might not get through all of the questions, but you’ll get used to working on a timer and this will make the CIA exam seem just like another study session.

It can be tempting to create large quizzes to burn through your study time quickly or to take 100-question quizzes to emulate the CIA exam. This isn’t in your best interest though. Taking several short quizzes will help you much more than one large quiz for a variety of reasons. Gleim suggests taking 30-minute, 20-question quizzes as the foundation of your studies. Short quizzes allow you to

• Better practice time management by allowing you to see results quickly.
• Process the answer explanations and learn from them in your review while the questions are still fresh in your mind.
• Vary content more by mixing in cumulative quizzes with your focused quizzes.
• Turn your short-term memorization into long-term understanding by providing breaks between topic introduction.