FE Exam Prep 13, Differential Calculus — Critical Points, L'Hopital, Partials

This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - How to find critical points by setting the first derivative to zero or finding where it's undefined. - The Second Derivative Test: a positive result means a local minimum (concave up), and a negative result means a local maximum (concave down). - L'Hopital's Rule is only for indeterminate forms (0/0 or ∞/∞) and requires differentiating the numerator and denominator separately. - The core technique for partial derivatives: treat all other variables as constants and differentiate normally. - A common exam trap is misapplying the quotient rule to L'Hopital's Rule or forgetting to check for an indeterminate form first. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep