Kaplan Mocks- Help!

Need some advice. I took the live mock yesterday, and it went very badly. 56% AM, 47% PM. Even ethics, which I’ve been scoring low 80s for in my qbank quizzes, went badly. With only two weeks to go I’m feeling like it’s almost pointless to sit this thing. What do I do here? Go back and reread whole sections? Or just keep drilling qbanks and mocks? Or shall I drill qbanks and use the books for any questions I don’t get, to hopefully refresh the concepts in my mind. Any advice is appreciated at the moment. I started studying for this thing back in July, but with hindsight I think I probably just focused on reading and just hitting EOC quizzes, regardless of whether I really understood the topic or not, which was a mistake.

I think at this stage you need to be drilling mock exams, not question banks. A good rule of thumb is for every minute you spend completing a mock exam, spend 1.5 minutes reviewing it. So really take the time to understand why you answered the way you did, and in particular focus on the areas that you performed poorly by going back into the readings and reading up on those questions specifically.

Mocks, read answers, read your notes where you feel weak and most importantly, dont give up on you.

Definitely not pointless! You have two weeks left (do you have some time off?) to learn from your mistakes and repair gaps in your memory. If you’ve studied everything, mocks will help you remember the material as well as train you in the way exam questions are asked (which is specific for every topic!). This will connect the knowledge you have gathered by reading and EOC quizzes to exam requirements. Complement your bad areas by making Qbank/EOC quizzes and reviewing your answers. Only spend a lot of time rereading sections if after making a mock and reviewing your answers you still feel you would not be able to answer a specific topic’s questions if it came up on exam day. At this stage you should rather do another mock on the overall exam than spend the same amount of time on a specific topic in my opinion.

I can’t stress this enough so I’ll stress it again: go practise exams crazy! CFAI exam, Schweser mocks are all good for L1. If you manage to do at least 3-5 and review in the coming two weeks you should have a great shot at improving your first mock’s score enough for a pass! The more the better of course! I think it’s not uncommon to score below par on an earlier mock you take, so don’t feel bad about the live one and look ahead instead of back. Finally: even if - friday next week - you still think you will not be able to pass, do go to the fricking exam! There’s always a chance you’ll manage to squeeze out a marginal pass and otherwise you’ll learn from the experience. In both cases I would not opt for throwing all my invested time away (I’m contra sunk cost on this one ;-)). Good luck!

Rather use CFAI official Mocks if you didn’t. Revise after each tour each incorrect and spurious correct answer. Then, take a tour again. Doesn’t matter if the questions are same as in last tour. This will help you thinking and solving in required manner. Schweser testing materials are good as additional source but if I understood well, you don’t have time for such games.

Pejp

To put some perspective on things, that exam was meant to make you feel the way you do now. I felt pretty ready and left with only a 64% which I was pretty demoralized about. Then I put my answers in and found out the average score of that exam was 53% so don’t beat yourself up too badly about it. Clearly there is work to be done on both of our ends, but I just wanted to let you know that the majority of people who did that, felt the same way you did. Its a good wake up call. Think about candidates that have yet to have that wake up call and will have to learn the hard way on exam day.

Best of Luck!

Yeah, I just saw that last night, and it did make me feel a little better. Thanks. It’s weird, I was actually feeling pretty confident, but in the mock I just couldnt seem to figure anything out. I’m not saying I was expecting to walk out with an 80+, but I really wasn’t expecting it to go so badly. I got around 60% in ethics, yet I’ve done nearly every qbank ethics questions and been crushing them, to the extent that I thought that even if I did ethics and then guessed half the other questions, I’d still be around 50. It was definitely a shock. Anyway, thanks for the advice everyone. Less than two weeks to turn this around!

At 40-55% I would feel pretty demoralized but maybe you have a 50% shot based on my experience below:

I took a live Mock Exam by kaplan last week and we graded everones test at the end… Of the 50 or so students, average score appeared to be about 50% with me being the winner at 72% overall. … I’m finally feeling pretty confident after seeing how others are scoring.

All I’ve been doing is drilling the qbank and the online mock exams. I’ve done all of Kaplan’s questions three times, and on my 4th time now. Doing the CFAI mocks multple times as well. I’m saving the Kaplan online mocks for the very end.

Yeah I’ve switched to mock exams only and scored a 70 today. Feeling slightly more confident.

pejp - felt/feel the same way. I have found an abundance of Kaplan questions to be written specifically to confuse you or mislead you to really test your understanding, especially within the Ethics section. I found that on numerous occasions, there would be conflicting answers in different tests within the ethics section because it is so subjective. I’ve done 4 practice exams from them with my 5th and final today so I think the sample size is large enough :).

Good luck this Saturday!