Study Tips to Help You Pass Your Insurance Exam

Passing the insurance exam is arguably the first and most significant step in beginning your career in the insurance industry. It not only gives you the foundational knowledge you need to do the job, it is also one of the 2 key prerequisites in your insurance license application.

To ensure your success on the insurance exams, you need good preparation, focus, and a few key strategies that we’ll outline below.

Read on to get our most important exam tips, born from our decades of experience in education, insurance, and from teaching over 40,000 students at PNC Learning. These tips will help you prepare efficiently and effectively to ensure you pass your exam on the first try.

Set the Right Foundation Early

Start Early

The first and most important thing you need to do is start early. The general rule out there is to give yourself 6 weeks of prep time and study a total of 70 hours (60-80) but our courses can help you cut down on the time required by up to 50% because we cut out the fluff and only teach you what matters in as simple a way as possible. With our course, you should plan to give yourself around 3-4 weeks of prep time.

Have a Plan

Now that you’ve given yourself some lead time, you will need to make sure that time is well-spent and structured to be as efficient as possible. We’ve all heard the saying… “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” So make sure you have a study plan: set deadlines for when you will be completing each chapter and avoid studying late at night when your brain is tired. My recommendation to students is to complete all the chapters at least 1 week before your exam date, so you can use the last week or so to review and practice.

Develop a study schedule that accommodates your learning style and the time remaining before the exam. Look at the amount of time you have before the exam date, the chapters in the course and break down the course material into manageable sections and allocate study time accordingly. Dedicate the last week (or last phase) solely to reviewing weak areas and doing practice exams.

Having a plan and a consistent study schedule (that you stick to) is the single best thing to increase your chances of success.

Know Your Enemy: Understand the Exam

If you want to successfully pass the exam, you have to understand it first.

Before diving in, understand the exam’s structure. How many questions are there? What types of questions (multiple choice, true/false, etc.)? How much time is allotted to complete the exam? What reference materials will you be allowed to use? What can you bring with you into the exam? How many questions will there be on each topic (exam weighting)?

This information (where available) is provided within the Introduction section of your course materials and will help you develop an effective study plan.

Study Smart, Not Just Hard

Use Active Learning Techniques

Don’t just passively read the content; engage with it. Move beyond passive reading. Print out your course notes and actively engage with them. Highlight key concepts as you watch the lectures, create your own real-world examples that resonate with you and will be easier to remember, create your own memory devices, and annotate the notes or even rewrite them in your own words to personalize them.

Test yourself early & often. Utilize the practice quizzes at the end of each chapter to solidify your understanding. Identify areas of weakness and revisit those sections in the notes and lectures to ensure you have a thorough understanding before moving on. The knowledge and concepts within the course build on themselves, so unless you have a solid foundation, it can be hard to understand and apply the material that comes after.

Make Notes and Test Yourself Often

The research is clear on this—nothing boosts your learning like actively engaging in the material. Digesting what we teach you and writing your own notes, in your own words (ideally with pen and paper), forces you to fully understand the concepts. Not only does this create a great study resource to refer to during your review stage, but the act of making it already helps your mind internalize and retain the material.

As you go through the material, you also want to make sure you’re testing yourself often. That’s why our course has quizzes after each chapter and larger assessments at certain points throughout the course. This is to encourage you to self-evaluate. To understand which areas you are strong in (so you can spend less time on them) and which areas you are weaker in and should dedicate more time to reviewing.

This becomes extra important as you get closer to your exam date because in those final days, you won’t have time to review the material again from cover to cover. You need to just focus on the areas that need that final polish.

Save and Reuse Practice Exams

Don’t waste too many of your practice exams early on. While they are a great resource, reserve at least 1 set of practice exam questions for the final stages of studying. Utilize them as a diagnostic tool to pinpoint areas requiring additional focus.

Try to set yourself up in a similar environment to the one you will be writing your exam in. Then, go through the practice exam without referencing any study materials (unless your exam allows it) and see how you do. The questions you get wrong will tell you which areas you need to focus your studies on. This targeted approach allows you to maximize your remaining study time.

Optimize the Way You Learn

Learn On-the-Go

Study on the go. We really believe in the power of flexible and on-demand learning, and that’s why we have audio lectures and a mobile app (details on how to download and access the app can be found inside the course). Utilize the course app and audio lectures to study during commutes, workouts, or other downtime. This effective use of fragmented time can significantly boost the amount of study time you can get in.

But be warned: Just listening is passive learning and is not as effective as active learning. To make just listening more active, I suggest pausing the audio at times and trying to work through different scenarios or applications for concepts in your head.

For example, if you’re learning about the peril of falling objects in home insurance, you’ll know that it only covers contents if it is incidental to structural damage. Run through a few scenarios in your head: 

• If a chandelier falls onto a glass dining room table and shatters it, is that covered? 
• What if a tree branch falls onto the house, through the roof, and onto the same table, shattering it? Is that covered? Why would one be covered and not the other?

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Consider forming a study group with fellow students in your course. Discuss concepts, solve practice problems together, and quiz each other. This collaborative approach can solidify understanding and identify areas needing clarification. One of the best ways to learn and understand something is to explain it to someone else. If you have trouble finding a group, reach out to your course provider – they might be able to connect you with other students.

When in Doubt, Ask Away!

Expert help is a click (or call) away. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your course tutors if you encounter roadblocks in your studies. We’re here to answer your questions, clarify concepts, and ensure your success on the exam.

Aside from making a study schedule and sticking to it, this is the second most important factor to our students’ success.

Learn How to Read Insurance Exam Questions

Aside from memorizing and understanding all of the material, one of the hardest things to do is to understand how to read the questions on your insurance exam.  Hopefully, this article will help.

Multiple Choice Tricks

Depending on which insurance exam you take, you will have definitions, multiple-choice, and short-answer questions.  When it comes to the multiple choice questions, they use 3 main tricks:

• They will use double negatives.  For example, they might ask you “what is NOT excluded” or “all of the following statements are true except…”.
• They will include details that seem like they don’t matter but are actually very important (& vice versa).  For example, they might bring up the length of a boat when asking about watercraft liability.
• When there are 4 options in the multiple choice, 2 choices will be obviously wrong but 2 choices will be somewhat correct.  Your job will be to pick the “best” answer.

Example Insurance Exam Questions

1. A fire recently damaged the building owned by your client. The loss is estimated at $50,000. The building was valued at $500,000; however, your client has insured it for $300,000. The coinsurance requirement is 80%. Using the co-insurance formula, how much of this loss is the insured required to absorb?

Comment: In the above question, they are asking about how much the insured is required to absorb; NOT how much the insurer will pay (which would be the most “natural” way of asking the question).  Pay attention to details when reading the question, but be able to filter unimportant details from important ones.

2. Under the Contributory Negligence Act, all of the following statements are true except one.

3. They can also put double negatives inside the multiple-choice options.  For example, they might be asking you to “find the statement that is not true”.  And one of the options could say: “losses or damage to outdoor plants by windstorm are not excluded”.  So you have to think to yourself – is it NOT true that damage to plants caused by a windstorm is NOT excluded.

The trick for solving these mental puzzles is to convert the phrases “not true” and “not excluded” into “false” and “covered”.  In this case: “Is it ‘false’ that damage to plants caused by a windstorm is ‘covered'?”.  Then you can see that the real question you have to answer is whether plants damaged by a windstorm is covered.

Stay Sharp on Exam Day

• Leave early. Give yourself enough time for travel and try to arrive 15 minutes early so you can relax before the exam starts. If you have exam anxiety, a student shared a great trick with me called 4x4 breathing. This involves breathing in deeply for 4 seconds, then breathing out for 4 seconds. I tried it recently before a particularly stressful meeting, and it really does help to calm the nerves, lower your heart rate and help you think more clearly.
• Eat. Eat a light meal and drink some water before the exam. Be careful though, you don't want to be wasting time in the washroom!
• Breathe. It helps when you’re relaxed. If you’re nervous or panicking, you’re not going to think as clearly or recall information as well.
• Read the question. Try to figure out what they’re asking for. Are they asking for yes or no (true or false) answers? Do they want examples or explanations? There might also be some double negatives or tricks mixed in so be careful!
  • Bonus: check the Glossary of Key Action Words in our courses for more information on this.
• Write clearly. This is important for short answer questions. If the marker can’t read your writing, they can’t mark it.
• Keep track of the time. Make sure you’re not spending too much time on 1 question.
• Go for the easy marks first.  Answer the questions you are sure about first. This will give you a boost of confidence, and you'll have more time to spend on the harder stuff.

Hopefully these were able to help you out. If you have any other good ones that have worked for you, feel free to share them with me at info@pnclearning.com - I'd love to post them on here and share them with the community.