CFA, PMP, CPA: How to Keep Chapter 2 Alive While You're on Chapter 14
· 5 min read
Certification exams like the CFA, CPA, PMP or an actuarial paper share a structure that ordinary courses don't. The curriculum is long. You work through it over months, often around a full-time job. And the exam tests all of it on one day.
Which creates a very specific problem. You do a solid job on the early readings. Three months later you sit a mock exam and realise the early material has quietly drained out. You go back to review it, and now the recent material starts slipping.
It feels like a personal failing. It's actually the default behaviour of memory, and there's a well-understood fix.
The forgetting curve is real
In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus memorised lists of nonsense syllables and tested himself at intervals afterwards. He found that forgetting is steepest right after learning and then slows down: you lose a lot in the first day or two, then less and less. A 2015 replication by Murre and Dros found essentially the same curve.
The useful part is what happens when you review. Each time you successfully recall something, it is forgotten more slowly afterwards. So the gaps between reviews can get longer and longer — a day, then a week, then a few weeks — and the material still holds.
That's spaced repetition, and it's the reason "review everything once at the end" doesn't work for a long curriculum. One review at the end is one data point on a curve that has already fallen.
How far apart should reviews be?
Research by Cepeda and colleagues (2008) looked at this directly: people learned material, reviewed it after gaps of different lengths, and were tested up to a year later. The headline finding was that the best gap between reviews gets longer the further away the test is. Cramming-style short gaps are fine for a test next week and poor for a test in four months.
You don't need to compute any of this. A schedule like the one used by SM-2, the algorithm behind many spaced-repetition tools, is a reasonable default:
- Got it wrong → see it again tomorrow.
- Got it right → about 6 days later.
- Right again → about 2 weeks.
- Right again → about 5 weeks.
- Miss it at any point → back to tomorrow.
The exact numbers matter less than the shape: short gaps while something is shaky, long gaps once it's solid.
Budgeting your hours
Here's what nobody tells you about spaced review on a long curriculum: your review load grows. In month one you have almost nothing to review. By month four, a big share of each session is review, because everything you've learned so far is circling back at different intervals.
If you plan your study hours as if every hour goes to new readings, you will fall behind on the new material — or, more often, quietly skip reviews and be back to the original problem.
A rough budget that works for many people:
| Phase | New material | Review |
|---|---|---|
| First third of your runway | ~75% | ~25% |
| Middle third | ~55% | ~45% |
| Final third, before the last month | ~40% | ~60% |
| Final month | none | all review and mocks |
And one rule that matters more than the table: reviews come first each day. New material is always there tomorrow. A review that's skipped for two weeks is a reading you'll have to learn again.
The "verified" bar
The other trap on long curricula is counting something as done too early. You answered the end-of-chapter questions correctly, so you mark the reading complete.
But answering a question you just studied, about material you just read, is the easiest test there is. A better bar before you stop worrying about a topic:
- You answered correctly with notes closed;
- On a question worded differently from the one you practised;
- Days later, not just the same session.
Until all three are true, it's not done; it's in progress. This sounds strict, but it's exactly what the exam will ask of you.
The final month
Stop learning new material roughly four weeks out (or earlier, if your curriculum is very long). Use that month for:
- Full mock exams under timed conditions, ideally one a week, increasing towards the end.
- Clearing your review queue, with special attention to anything you've missed more than once.
- Mixed practice across the whole curriculum. On exam day the topics come shuffled; practise them shuffled.
A topic you're still weak on four weeks out is usually better served by repeated review of what you nearly know than by a last-minute first attempt at what you don't.
You don't have to build a flashcard deck anymore
The traditional reason people skip spaced repetition on a curriculum this size is the overhead. Turning thousands of pages into good flashcards is weeks of work before you've reviewed anything.
AI has mostly removed that obstacle. You can paste in a reading and ask for questions on each key point. Check them against the source — AI can misread a table or get a formula subtly wrong — but checking is much faster than writing.
What a chat can't do is the scheduling: remember what you missed and bring it back on the right day, across hundreds of items. That's the job of a spreadsheet, a flashcard app, or a tool like Tali, which writes the questions from your own curriculum and schedules what you miss. Whatever you use, the important thing is that something other than your memory is keeping track of what your memory is losing.