After a month long stressful preparation I finally took and passed my California Property & Casualty (P&C) License Exam yesterday (April 12) and oh boy I was feeling overwhelmed for no reason: The P&C exam was far less challenging than I thought — although its contents are much richer than Life, Health & Accident, so much so that I would say that unless one understands P&C insurance one cannot claim understanding insurance in general.
Now that I have done two insurance license exams, one on Life, Health & Accident and another on Property & Casualty this time, I realized that State exams are generally more “examinee friendly” than the federal ones. All insurance businesses are regulated by states, so the license exams are always administrated by the state insurance commissioner. The exam was supposed to be 195 minutes long with 150 questions, but I finished the whole thing in about 75 minutes and was able to recheck my work once and then managed to walk out the test center 70 minutes earlier — with a score of getting 131 questions right out of a total of 150 questions (88%). I could have taken it two weeks earlier and still passed it with getting 60% of the questions right.
Many questions on the exam are taken straight from the exam preparation books, one by Upward Bounding Training and another by Affordable Educators, the two great — and complementary — sources of exam related learning, especially the latter. Of course, not all topics were covered by the two sources, such as “pet insurance” and insurance regulations in the times of “state of emergency.” In fact, as I have never been exposed to those topics, I could only randomly pick the answers for those questions.
Anyway, time was not wasted from forcing myself to sit down and to study the materials over and over to memorize them. This holds especially true for the Affordable Educators book of 503 pages. More importantly, spending time on these materials offers me the opportunity to do some deep thinking, which I know I would not do once I receive my license. Time was not wasted also because studying insurance rules and regulations made me mindful of how global governance can benefit from insurance — even though the two seem to have nothing in common. I will write another post on this!
The next exam I will take is on Securities that is administrated by FINRA, a federal test. I will need Series 6 license to sell mutual funds and variable annuities.