When I signed up for the FSA Level I exam in July 2026, I was fairly dismissive about how difficult it might be – I figured I may be able to pass it barely studying anything. I’d been doing sustainability reporting for close to a decade and assumed it would be familiar ground. The experience humbled me, and I came out of it much better for it. I passed in October 2026 on my first attempt, but I did have to delay my testing date last minute!
I chose to study without a prep course, figuring I could just read the study guide and be fine. There were a few moments of panic when I questioned that choice. I looked for credible mock tests and would happily have paid around $50 for them, but couldn’t find any. I did find other people’s flashcards and a few short quizzes online, but their quality varied and I couldn’t tell where they came from or whether they were reliable enough to study from (and by that point I was running short on time and couldn’t waste any).
Paid prep courses from providers like Earth Academy are a different matter, because they’re IFRS Approved Education Providers and you can trust that their content is the right level of quality. You can explore all the IFRS Approved Education Providers on the IFRS Foundation website.
In the end I did it without any paid help, and wanted to capture my learnings here for others going through this experience.
If you have the budget and would rather be guided through it, I’d very much recommend the Earth Academy prep course. This includes videos that guide you through the content, 300 practice questions (this is the real gold worth paying for, because the IFRS Study Guide only comes with 45 practice questions), an hour of coaching with one of their teachers, Shivani or Lorinda, who are both absolutely brilliant, plus some extra AI tutoring and extra exam scheduling flexibility. (Full disclosure: we earn a small commission if you sign up using our 10% discount code HTESG10, but we only do this because we genuinely love them!).
But if you’re brave enough to not use a prep course, read on…!
The two lessons that mattered most
- If finance is new to you, it will read like gibberish until you properly learn it. There’s talk of alpha, GAAP, fundamental analysis, and tilts… but none of it is complicated, you just need to read the text carefully and take it in.
- Practical reporting experience only gets you so far. The study guide relies heavily on IFRS-specific concepts, such as the specific elements of decision-useful information or the concepts that underpin the definition of materiality. You need to memorise the concepts themselves, in the guide’s own terms: if something has four components, know all four by name. You don’t need to memorise statistics, dates or examples, but if you can’t recall the concepts precisely, you risk failing.
So set aside the time to read the whole guide with focus. There’s no getting away from it.
What I did (and what not to do)
I booked the exam about eight weeks out and divided the 15 chapters so I could read them over seven weeks, leaving the last week for revision. In practice, that meant reading the study guide every Thursday for three to five hours.
It didn’t work at all. Some weeks my workload meant I couldn’t make time for it, and I’d forgotten much of what I read the week before. When I finally tried the practice questions at the back of the study guide, a week before the exam, I got far too many wrong to feel confident. (That was another mistake, do the practice questions upfront, so you get a good feel for how the information is tested. This will make your studying more focused and effective.)
So I pushed the exam back three weeks and studied intensively, which worked much better. Don’t be afraid to push it back if you need to, because failing and losing the exam fee is far worse. Here’s what I did on my second approach:
- I read each chapter properly and carefully, and at the end of the day (or study session) explained all its concepts out loud, either to myself or to my husband, like a fun little bedtime story. It’s a bit painful, but extremely effective. (“It all started with the 1929 financial crash, when investors couldn’t trust the information provided about companies’ value…”)
- Once I’d covered most of the content and talked it all through, I uploaded the study guide to an AI assistant and asked it to quiz me one section at a time.
This is the prompt I used:
This is the official study guide for an exam I’m taking soon. Without changing the meaning or wording of anything, and paying extra attention to the learning objectives for each chapter, the questions for testing understanding and any words in bold, give me simulated multiple-choice questions one by one to test my knowledge. Use the same style and format for the questions, as the practice questions in the back of the study guide.
The prompt makes the AI mirror the question format of the official sample questions, and each explanation runs back through the underlying concepts. So it works as a quiz and a set of flashcards at the same time.
One caveat: the AI’s questions weren’t as tough or as clever as the real exam questions, so it often felt a bit too easy. The real value came from the repetition. Even when a question was easy, it made me revisit the concept and remember what mattered about it. So don’t expect AI to give you perfect simulated questions (that would make it far too easy!), you’d probably need Earth Academy’s 300 mock questions for the real deal.
What not to do:
- Don’t rely on one long session a week. Shorter, more frequent sessions stick better.
- Don’t leave the practice questions until the end. Use them early to find out where you stand and get a feel for how the content is tested, then do them again in the last week to be sure you’ve gotten to where you need to be.
- Don’t push on with an exam date you’re not ready for. Rescheduling is usually free if you do it early enough (a few days), but check the terms as they might change.
How to use AI to your advantage
- Work a few chapters at a time. Get it to quiz you on each chapter, then a block of 2-3 at a time, then the full thing. This way you ensure you cover everything in enough detail.
- Push back when it gets picky. Left alone, the AI drifted into obscure details, asking me about specific dates and quotes from reports cited in the study guide, which definitely will not be on the real test. The study guide itself says the exam tests conceptual understanding, so steer the AI back to the learning objectives and key concepts.
- Make it quote the guide. Explanations that quote the study guide word for word double as flashcards, and they’re easy to check.
On the day: read every word
Pay close attention to wording. Very often a small change in wording trips you up, or there’s something you simply didn’t notice. I found some of the questions intentionally tricky! Read each question and all the answer choices carefully, a few times if you need to, until you’re sure you’ve taken it all in. If you rush, you can lose marks just because you missed a word and misunderstood or assumed something.
This is also why I used almost the full two hours. I took the time to double- and triple-check that I understood each question and caught any tricks.
Good luck! I will be back with more thoughts once I get through Level II, which I hear is a different beast!
