Moving on from R01 to R02
Within a week or so of passing R01, I decided I didn’t want to get out of the groove of studying so I cracked on with R02 and passed the exam in December. This was such a relief as I found myself far more stressed in the weeks leading up to the exam than I did with R01. With R01, a lot of the content is general things you will cover within your job in financial services and I already had an awareness of some of the topics. People will tell you R01 is a good starting point as a lot of what is covered in this unit crops up in the other R0s and I really found this to be the case.
Planning, preparation and practice
I planned my studying much like I did with R01 as this worked well for me previously. Each week I would read 1 or 2 chapters, write out the essential study notes provided by Expert Pensions then take their quizzes and use the question bank on RevisionMate to test and verify my knowledge.
I used the forum provided by Expert Pensions a few times while studying for R02. I struggled to understand the workings out for some of the calculation questions and Tessa was able to explain the answers in a way which I understood right away. There were certain things that no matter how many times I read over it, I couldn’t make sense of it in my head! Having someone to explain it to me in a different way was really helpful.
Expert Pensions provided a full mock exam for R02 and you also get one from the CII when you enroll in the course. I had to stop myself from taking them too early, because although I was itching to know how I was getting on I really wanted to make sure I could give myself a good idea of how I would do in the exam. I took the CII mock exam first, highlighted the areas of the syllabus I needed to work on, studied for another week then took the Expert Pensions mock exam a few days before the actual exam. This helped put my mind at ease as I passed both so knew there was a chance for me to do well!
Exam tips
When it came to sitting the exam, during R01 I was left with a lot of time at the end to go over my answers, think about any questions I was unsure of and really check everything thoroughly. This was NOT the case with me for R02. I underestimated the time it would take me to do calculations and work out multiple answers to select the right one. I realised about half an hour into the exam that I was behind in my time and started to panic slightly. I decided that from then on, any questions that were not quick hits/ie, I knew the answer right away, I would flag and then go back to them later. This meant I made back time quite quickly and I will definitely be adopting this approach in the next exam!
I had about 30 minutes after answering the questions to go back and review the ones I had flagged. Most of these were questions which required some form of calculation so they took me a bit longer. There were a few questions where you had to do a calculation for maybe 4 sets of data and then you had to compare them, so these questions took the most time.
My most important tip for R02 (and probably all of the exams to come) would be to look at the syllabus and how many questions there will be on each learning outcome BEFORE you start studying and not when you have finished the book (like I did!). [Click here to view the CII R02 syllabus content]
I spent a lot of time feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the equations/calculations you need to remember, but for the ‘apply the principles time value of money’, there are actually only three questions in the exam for this learning outcome. On one hand, spending a lot of time on this meant I really knew the equations inside out, however as there were only three questions on this I feel focusing my efforts elsewhere could have been more beneficial for me.
A couple of weeks off this time then it’s onto R03!
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