1/2 killed me, other half was fantastic. No idea if I passed.
Its strange different opionions from diffterent people. I thought the afternoon was 10x harder, many people thought the morning was.
feel the exact same way…felt so good going to lunch, but knew from previous discussions that i should be very concerned about what i was going to see when i came back…and it proved to be true.
i do have to say this, though…
the exam was very fair. there was not one moment where i felt like i was being blindsided or it was just too difficult or that i was being asked something ridiculous or extraordinary. i felt that i had a responsibility to know some areas better than i did, and it was a failing on my part, and had i have known them i would have been able to answer the questions in a matter of seconds. if i did indeed fail it i will be back at it in june because this was very much within reach.
Morning was fun. The afternoon was more difficult.
I think there are two versions of the exam… one group sees the hard half in the morning, and the other group sees the hard half in the afternoon.
it wasnt very fair.
well, then i hope more people feel like you do than i do
Afternoon was more difficult than Morning for me. But for both sessions, I’d say it’s either you know it right away or you have no clue.
Interesting exam (my first experience with CFA)
I felt good after the AM session. Went to lunch. Went over a few notes in a happy mood. Did the PM session. Left feeling like I didn’t pass.
I was surprised at the simplicity and briefness of the questions, though. So much simpler than the mock. For that, I feel like I did better than I initially thought I’d do going into the exam.
If I fail, I think it wouldn’t be due to a lack of deep understanding of certain topics but more a lack of high-level understanding of certain topics.
I didn’t think the pm session was harder. I was a lot more fatigued in the afternoon though which didn’t help. All up to the curve now. Did seea few interesting things, like one person bring Casio calculator to the exam and another one being a beast and not bringing a calculator at all!
Am I the only one who thought the afternoon was much easier than the morning? I think I scored about 15% higher in the afternoon.
Me too.
The afternoon was a joy and exactly what I expected.
The morning was weird. It was full of unexpected things & unlike the CFAI mocks. If I fail I’ll know it’s because I didn’t give myself enough time to review big-picture things and key sentences throughout the text (I focused on equations)
So good to see AF back in action … missed it badly all through yesterday
As for me
Morning session - Was significantly difficult and i was forced to make intelligent guesses on a number of questions and absolute guesses for a few Afternoon session - Was much better and it felt more like the mocks / sample papers that i had attempted Overall i think even though the afternoon session was good it was not good enough to recoup the losses of the morning session I have very low confidence of clearing it this time … and feel that I might fall short marginally. In the 36 hours post the exam i could count atleast 15q’s which i got wrong (many of these were intelligent guesses) but some are also those that i was confident about at the time of answering but realised that there was a trick much later when i going through it in my mind post the exam. Interesting how every year different people feel differently about the 2 sessions … goes to show that it is not the exam that is easy/difficult rather our famliarity with certain topics and our frame of mind going into a session.
I was more concerned with the math too- maybe that’s why we felt that way. I didn’t read the cfai textbooks and frankly hadn’t ever seen a bunch of terms that came up in the morning.
I totally agree with this … even i thought there were too many theoritical questions in certain sections which had scope for numericals … worse still these were hidden in some corner of the material/notes
Even i had focussed on numericals in the last 2 weeks and felt miserable to see some very straight-forward theoritical quetions go by
Overall i felt the exam was very fair and balanced … u had to know both … “How is X defined” & also “What does X imply” … if u relied on just one part … u will be at the risk of losing out
Ah! Light bulb moment when I read your post:
my problem was partly that I focused on the formulas, but also that I read the CFAI texts once very quickly and then focused on the Schweser material. During the exam I actually vaguely remembered reading key sentences in the CFAI texts but I couldn’t remember exactly what they said. bah!
Anyway, I may join the June 2013 group.
how long did you guys take to finish the exam in both of the sessions?
Morning - 2h 50mins
Afternoon - 2h 30mins
Lack of time was not the issue in either of the sessions
morning 2:40 mins
afternoon 2:50 mins
agreed. i only finished one pm session of my mocks on time…this was clearly not the case
Yes, I agree the exam was very fair.
morning took me about 2:20 mins
Afternoon took me 2:30…alot of guesses.
Unexpectedly, I think finishing early may have hurt me. I went back and changed some ethics questions which may have been right in the first place, but upon my second and third read i started nitpicking on specific words.