Hello guys, Now that the exam is over and everyone can enjoy sleeping well again, what do you think about the exam? I will post my detailed opinion in a reply to this post later Omar
I thought the exam was easy and straight forward. Q: Are you allowed to leave early on the PM test? Because a lot of people in my test did.
AM was good for me…but PM was disaster…you can leave anytime except the last 30mins…i left 50mins before time in PM session 
If there is a way to title my CFA level 1 experience, I would say: Ethics and self-fulfilling prophecy! Prior to the actual exam, I have taken couple of mock exams in which is scored between end of 80% and beginning of 90% range. Although I haven’t done well in ethics in most of the exams, I still managed to pass it in the mock exams (above 70% in most of them). However, before actual exam, I started reading online about people describing how ethics in the exam is unsolvable no matter how much efforts you put in it and that ethics is a nightmare and …. – That was it! I decided: I will fail ethics! My AM session started, at 9:00 am, I found myself starting with question 19 (Quantitative methods), and at 10:05 am, I found myself in question 120 (end of the exam – left around 7 questions unsolved in all sections). I went back to solve/guess those 7 questions that I didn’t know. The exam was way easier than what I thought. I started ethics at 10:15 am. I read the first question, didn’t know the answer, I read the second question, didn’t know the answer, …., I read question 18, and didn’t know the answer. By 10:35 I had all my answers filled on the scantron except for 1 – 18. I started reading ethics question again and managed to know around 50% for sure and had to make educated guesses for the rest. I left the sessions 45 minutes before the end of allocated time. The same exact situation happened to me again in PM session. This is not to say that ethics was hard; in fact, I would say that it was much easier than all other sample exams I took. Unlike some sample exams, there were no questions on the actual test that came from a different planet! Whenever I read a question, I would think: I KNOW THIS but my fear from the way people used to describe the questions on the actual exam made me end up doing stupid choices. In fact, I have changed my answers to couple of questions on ethics that I was 100% sure of because I thought there had to be “tricks” in them and when I read ethics book again, I found that my original choices were correct!! Moral of the story: DON’T LISTEN 
Although I’m extremely positive about passing the exam, it was really a self-fulfilling prophecy what I had to go with ethics. My mistake was that I listened to what people said and forced myself to make it the outcome of that part of the exam. It’s a lesson to learn from for future levels anyways 
Omar
mp3bu Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I thought the exam was easy and straight forward. > > Q: Are you allowed to leave early on the PM test? > Because a lot of people in my test did. I left before 45 mins - yes you can leave in both
morning i did great, afternoon i felt like i did on my practice exams (68-80% range) we shall see! I was mostly shocked by who was actually taking the exam. I felt quite out of place…being only 22 and only having an undergrad degree in econ. The average age of the people around me was probably 38-40ish…all had masters degrees, three already had their CPAs, everyone had solid careers, etc. Was a reality shock to be honest…makes me want to take another look at grad schools. Anyone know when we get the results?
mnieman: Usually the end of January, and I had the same feeling. There were 30+ year olds around me. One guy had been working at Moody’s for 4 years, another at IBM for 10, and the guy next to me I didn’t talk to… He burped loudly at random points during the exam.
Morning was great, passed it without a doubt. Afternoon killed me! I can’t believe how much harder I thought the afternoon exam was in comparison to the morning session! Ethics has always been the easiest part for me and its probably the subject I spent the least amount of time on but there was one or two questions that I was shocked they would ask and were way more complicated then they should have been. All in all I think it’s a toss up for me. Passed AM, failed PM would be my guess.
Ditto for me. Nailed AM…bombed PM. Fingers crossed for results.
I feel iffy about PM too, but I think it’s just because you’ve been drained of 10 years of life by that point. The afternoon was REALLY that hard that people next to you start mumbling and sighing.
Total Opposite for me! Found the AM part confusing and Hard absolutely killed the PM found it easy!
Yes PM was indeed harder than AM … not that much harder though. When I left exam I thought it was harder only because we were already tired after first session Omar
mnieman Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > morning i did great, afternoon i felt like i did > on my practice exams (68-80% range) > > we shall see! > > I was mostly shocked by who was actually taking > the exam. I felt quite out of place…being only > 22 and only having an undergrad degree in econ. > The average age of the people around me was > probably 38-40ish…all had masters degrees, three > already had their CPAs, everyone had solid > careers, etc. Was a reality shock to be > honest…makes me want to take another look at > grad schools. > > Anyone know when we get the results? Same - I felt that me and my friend were the only 21 years old people taking it lol Results will be out on late Jan … One candidate told me after the exam that it will be on 28th of Jan which is my birthday LOL
One thing that surprised me and was pointed it out by a member in different post: I thought that anything that wasn’t tested in AM would definitely come up on PM. I think everyone thought the same but it was impressive to see that this wasn’t necessarily the case; It really makes you reach the conclusion: never assume anything about the exam! Also, I ignored studying set of formulae/ratios prior to exam because I thought: NO WAY THIS WOULD COME UP and one of those formulae/ratios, to my surprise, actually came. Again: never assume anything about the exam
since you did study from the text, and now with 100% hindsight - go take a look at the book to see how many times those formulae were repeated and drilled (across a number of examples, material in the text and so on). This repetition is CFAI’s way of telling you how important that topic is… and this feature does definitely repeat across in Level II as well. (repetition in material = high probability of being asked in the exam).
I felt the AM session covered the stuff that you would expect to be on the exams. I think there was only one question that I had to completely guess on and only a few questions where I had to make an educated guess. There were a number of knowledge questions in the PM session that I didn’t know. I basically had to guess them. There were also a few problems that I did not know the right way to solve. Overall I think I passed if 70% is the cut off. Hopefully not too many people felt like it was easy.
I went in feeling a little unprepared. AM session: Awful, i guessed plenty of them. Felt really bad. PM session: 10 times BETTER than AM session. Started well and kept going well. There were qs i had no idea about, but generally better than the mocks i did and better than the AM session. However, i just have no idea what i would get and whether I would have got anywhere near enough 70% just cant tell Are we allowed to discuss specific qs? or certain things like… in derivs what is meant by the moneyness?
Cokecan, beware of the CFAI pledge. Moneyness means how much an option is in the money. 100 Strike call and if the stock is at 112, its 12$ in the money.
I felt the opposite than most of the people here, the morning for me was a complete disaster. The afternoon was much, much easier. What surprised me was the lack of calculation related problems. Maybe it was just my perception but it seemed like there were a lot fewer of those type of questions than on any of the practice exams. I don’t feel too confident but I guess we’ll see on Jan 28, could be a long day…
Overall I thought the exam was much more straight forward than elan/cfai mocks. The questions were mostly one step process, unlike in the mocks where you have to derive one step to derive the final answer. The PM session was definitely harder than the AM session as I felt the AM session covered more fundamental topics and PM filled in the gaps. I actually like the PM better since I feel that it better tested the knowledge was deserving of studying many many hours for.