I felt the exam was fair, and similar in style/difficulty to the mocks/schweser material. With that said, I’m still expecting to fail.
55% of the questions were easy.
1-2% were like “okay this is new”
The other 43% was “I’ve seen this before in my studies 5x, but I don’t know how to do it, so I’m just going to make a guess instead of burning the clock”
I don’t know if the PM section was easier or if I just managed the clock better.
I felt like the ethics was pretty easy, the equities was easy for the most part.
I thought the Econ and FRA were really tough.
The derivatives were easier than expected and the fixed income/quant was harder than expected.
Yes, ethics was way harder in the aft compared to the morning… I found in general the first part of the afternoon exam was a lot harder. It seemed to get easier though as I progressed, thank god. That’s my opinion anyway.
Morning was slightly easier than afternoon in my opinion. Finished both sessions in 2:30 approximately. I feel very suspicious, because the questions were simple (few details), but i have noticed so many tricky questions and so many traps. I was able to identify some of them, but surely i fell into others. I think too many people were confident at the end of this exam… Way more than 30% of the people got out with bright smiles on their faces.
I have made 2 or 3 silly mistakes i’m realizing just now, so this is pretty depressing. All in all, i was prepared enough for this, i just hope i performed well enough too!
I feel this way too. I’m not sure if i became overconfident or complacent; or the questions were really straightforward. I spoted 1-2 tricky parts though.
Now i’m paranoid if i shaded the right answers in the answersheet. ugh.
I found both the morning and the afternoon session to be easy.
Between the two i found the morning session to be relatively easier. Untill yesterday i was pretty happy and was hoping to pass. But after reading everyone’s comments on AF im a lil scared… the MPS is gonna be very high this time, hope i get through.
Definitely thought Fixed Income and Quantitative Methods was much harder than what I practiced on. I also agree with what someone else said: there were much more qualitative questions than quantitative questions from what was on my mocks. FI and QM were two of my strongest sections going in but probably the two sections i was weak on when I actually took the exam. I’m definitely on the same boat as you, Yushin–was positively/mostly sure on about 140-150 ish, 80-90 questions i narrowed it down to 2 choices and about 10 questions, I just randomly picked.
I think the exam was a very fair one, relatively straightforward. The CFAI mocks were definitely better preparation for it than the Schweser ones i(though those were still good for practicing the concepts).
PM felt a bit easier than AM. I finished both about half way through, then ran through everything again. In the AM I stayed till the end, in the PM I left an hour early. Only 5-7 or so questions were a complete stab in the dark, a few I was between two options but for the majority I felt like I knew what the correct answer was. I don’t think I’ll fail, but of course, time will tell.
Can’t believe the exam was as easy as people telling her. Talked to some guys after the exam and absolutely everybody told me the exam was hard with some tricky questions. Especially ethics was tricky with lot of questions were you couldn’t be sure about the correct answers.
I personally found the exam was a bit easier than the Schweser and CFAI mocks (except ethics). I had round about 5-10 questions were I had to guess and maybe 30 questions where I could eliminated one of the answers and so had to pick one of two.
I’m not sure if it was enough. Fortunately I finished both exams after 2 hours, so I had 1 hour left in each exam to check some questions again. There I was able to correct some answers, which will save me 5-10 Points I guess.
from years of L1 candidates feedback, the AM is generally easier. And for my L2, the AM was absolutely brutal and the PM got way easier. L3 was challenging all around.
I thought the exam was fair. It wasn’t easy nor was it difficult. It was manageable and in line with the CFAI mock exams. The Schweser exams were long-winded and involved more calculations while the actual exam was more straightforward. There were a handful of conceptual fact-based questions that I don’t think Schweser covered and you had to possibly read the finer prints within the CFAI curriculum to get those questions.
That said, I generally struggle with the FRA section and use the half way point (1.5 hour) to see if I’m behind during the exam based on my mock experience. Near the 2 hour point in the AM session, I started panicing a little because I had 40 questions left. I had doubt and uncertaintly crossing my mind but I got a grip of myself and just skipped FRA to my stronger subjects (Fixed Income, Corp Finance, Alternative Investments). I blew by those in less than half an hour and came back and reattempted the ones I skipped or made educated guesses.
I found the PM session to be more difficult but since i managed my time better and maybe didn’t have the mental stress from the AM, I was able to work through it. In both sessions, I didn’t really get a chance to review my answers. There were definitely a feel tricky questions. I guessed on probably 10 of them, eliminating some obvious choices.
That said, I think each individual has a different exam or it’s given in a different order. There were people talking about questions in the exam and I couldn’t help by overhear someone say that he saw one question in the PM session while someone else saw the same question in the AM session.
Overall, after the dust settled, maybe I did better than I thought? I don’t tknow. Fingers crossed. Good luck to all…
Agree with many of the above. Thought AM was easy… went to lunch thinking I had this in the bag. Then PM came and was pretty brutal. I’m going to start taking notes for L2 in a couple weeks I suppose. If I didn’t pass well then I’ll just be that much further ahead preparing for 2016… Ugh that just sucks to think out that far. Jan 30ish can’t come soon enough!
How long does it normally take for the results to be publicised?
I must force myself to move on and start preparing for L2 as I can’t stop worrying about the exam results… It’s very stressful to be constantly worrying and be scared for the long awaited pass/fail result.
So are you in any way affected by how well your peers do?
The MPS is determined by the institute every year right? So if there was a question that 90% of candidates got wrong, would it be likely that that particular question would get discounted?
Overall I felt ethics was tricky. I always had it narrowed down to one answer or another on a lot of the questions.
The other areas I felt were fair and represented the material we were required to study.
I finished both exams in about an hour and 30 minutes so i was able to go back and check my answers. I feel like i didn’t do my best, but i scored higher than a 70. Schweser was deffinetly harder than the CFAI exam for sure!
I had a similar experience last Dec. Thought morning session was cake (with the exception of ethics) and thought the afternoon was brutal. Left the exam room feeling good…but not great by any means. The key thing to remember though is that we’re all accustomed to shooting for 90% on exams…but on this one you only have to get a C-. That makes it tough to gauge the question of ‘did I’ or ‘didn’t I’ pass. I ended up >70 in all categories, I’m sure you’ll be fine.
After a few weeks the pain of not knowing results right away starts to ebb and you’ll start thinking about it far less. If you were scoring above 70% on CFAI mocks, then you passed so don’t even worry about it. Start studying for L2 as soon as possible (but obviously can’t get CFAI materials until it’s confirmed that you passed level 1.
another thing to keep in mind, and i’m sure most people are but just in case, the sample from analyst forum isn’t really indicative of the entire population of test takers. i took this exam a few years ago and studied for about 100-200 hrs, but was in NO way prepared as much as one needs to be. In fact I didn’t even get through all the material for a first read. I knew I likely failed coming out, but you still go b/c you never know if you hit lightning in a bottle on your guesses.
My point is, there are lots of candidates that probably didn’t prepare for this exam at a level even close to required for a chance at passing, given different people’s time constraints, or underestimation of the breadth of material. So everyone on here saying they found chunks of it, or the whole thing, relatively easy compared to mocks, shouldn’t necessarily send everyone into a panic, or feel that the majority of candidates felt the same way. keep calm…
Well, this is far from a random sample so I’m not that surprised.
Felt the exam was fair, and pretty much what I expected going in. It was challenging, but on par with the CFAI mocks.
I am surprised to hear about people struggling with ethics, I actually thought every question was very straightforward. It will definitely be the subject that goes the furthest to bettering my grade.
I think I passed, but if I missed a large proportion of my 50/50 guesses, I could be in trouble!
That’s true - over 66,000 people writing the exam around the world.
the ~100 or so that you might actually hear about the exam either on forums on in person is not even close to a 1% representation of the entire sample.