I scored 63% on the morning session and 60% in the afternoon session of Mock 1. Just took the morning session of Mock 2 and scored 62% i am kinda freaking out. Should I be?
Start focusing on your weak areas. Go over the mock and review why you missed the questions you did. We have almost two weeks before the exam.
@mp48 I am also feeling same thing. I took ELAN mocks last week. Mock1 AM: 59.2% PM: 64.1% Mock2 AM: 69.2% (took yestday) I am also panicking. I am trying to do as many questions as possible from schweser and Elan. Here is my plan for 2 weeks. Take Elan mock 2 PM, Mock 3 AM&PM, targeting 1000Q more from Qbank(did 1000), CFAI mock, Ethics review and weak areas review and 11 th hour. Not sure i have enough time. Please share your thoughts. Cheers,
My scores last june were about the same 2 weeks before the exam and i passed…everything came back on exam day.
Freak out, La Freak, Sa Chik
The elan mock kicked my ass also. I only took the first AM&PM but got about 55% for both. Already did most of the 2000 questions. Try not to stress, there is a long 12 days ahead. I just got murdered on anything that required a calculation or formula though. SOOO im taking the next few days to look over things. Ill take the second mock and then see where i stand. Its been a 6 or 8 weeks sense ive read some of this stuff now.
I am thinking about just doing tons of problems and then using flash cards to brush up on my weak spots. I think I am going to go back and do the problems in all the CFA books this weekend during thanksgiving. I plan on taking 2 more kaplan exams and doing the CFAI mock exam on thursday of next week.
vyadagiri I think there is time just need to focus on your weak spots.
Try re-reading ethics if you are not getting stellar scores in that area. Knowing the rules doesn’t require any feats of mental dexterity, so it can be a relatively low-intensity way of boosting your score.
Econ is killing me, I reread the book and went through the videos from Stalla, I am just not getting some of the relationships. Too many to remember and I didn’t take Econ in college so I’m suffering any thoughts on how to retain this? Other areas I am doing well, if I could bring my econ score up from 30% I would score mid 70%.
I am not hot on econ either. One source that helped was the explanation from Investopedia. For some reason they phrased some of the basic concepts in a way that clicked for me better than Schweser or CFAI. http://www.investopedia.com/exam-guide/cfa-level-1/microeconomics/default.asp
@ski2much and vyadgiri: That’s a very decent score on the Elan mocks (even though there are people here who are killing those mocks). Don’t be discouraged. You have two weeks to brush up on formulas, review your mistakes and take more mock tests. @atomicrooster: If you are really struggling that badly with Econ you might want to give Elan’s econ videos a shot. They have one in their free trial, and then you can buy the ones you want separately.
Guys we have less than 2 weeks but thats plenty of time. At this point we are VERY WELL into our review process; you know the material. Take some time and really grind it out, don’t rush it. The concepts really aren’t crazy, there’s just a ton. Granted I’m only scoring a 75% and 83% on the morning/afternoon section, I promise you it doesn’t mean I know it any better than you do. Let’s lose a couple more hours a sleep a day(SCREW WORK!), we got Thanksgiving. After these next two cranky weeks, we can sleep to the oblivion and not worry about it…UNTIL LEVEL 2 BECAUSE WE WILL ALL PASS. Best of luck.
Yea if you guys are well into the review phase, it should be fine. If review is starting now, then it would be time to really worry.
Ski2Much Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The elan mock kicked my ass also. I only took the > first AM&PM but got about 55% for both. Already > did most of the 2000 questions. Try not to stress, > there is a long 12 days ahead. > > I just got murdered on anything that required a > calculation or formula though. SOOO im taking the > next few days to look over things. Ill take the > second mock and then see where i stand. Its been a > 6 or 8 weeks sense ive read some of this stuff > now. At some point in the next two weeks, it might behoove you to spend a couple hours memorizing formulas. The CFA exams require surprisingly little calculation - people have passed L1 doing the calculations by hand rather than a calculator - but there will be a few questions where it’s extremely handy to know the formula and you can just plug and chug. Here’s how I memorized formulas - get a sheet of paper and write out equations repeatedly, circling back to the ones you started with, jumping around to formulas in different topics as you move along. Do that for an hour or so and you should be able to produce the formulas from memory. But your mileage might vary. frisian, CFA
Thanks for this tip. It’s such a simple solution that I should be utilizing more often. Usually when I see a question about ratios or any formula, the first thing I do is write it down. It helps me analyze the relationship between the variables, and it’s a great way to memorize them. This is how I remembered all the turnover ratios. I’m going to do this for the rest of the formulas tonight. Thanks!
That first Elan mock was much harder IMO than the 2000 questions. When they say you should be very pleased with 65%, I think they meant it. At least that’s what I hope…
I think he means the first of the three that they sell on their website.
If you are getting 60%+, don’t freak out. 60% is a wee bit low to feel confident, but it’s within striking distance, and you have time to bring it up just a bit, and you’re good. With Econ, the key is “low hanging fruit.”. There is so much material to cover and only 10% of the questions asked. Don’t kill yourself studying there unless you think that you can’t improve your scores elsewhere by allocating your time to those segments. Ironically, that’s the principle of marginal labor productivity (your labor) applied to this exam.