Today I tried to do full mock exam in order to simulate the real exam and be prepared. After morning part, I was completely mentally stunned. I can say for sure, the last 10 questions I chose randomly to finish the mock faster, as my brain was overloading.
I’m not sure how i’m gonna deal with the real exam. By the way, I completed the mock with almost 40 min left, and got 81%.Tried to take 1 hour break after the exam (as in actual exam), however completely burned out after 7th Ethics question, and stopped it.
Any tips how to last whole 2 exams. Before, in other Kaplan’s mocks I used to skip ethics part and do it after I complete the rest, since Ethics takes the majority of my concentration. Sometimes I spent too much time on particular questions.
Exercising, sleeping and eating well obviously all help, but mainly you need to try and forget about the stress. Be confident because 81% is already a really good score and you still have two weeks (1st of dec right?) to prep and do more mocks. Just be confident on exam day and D-day adrenaline will take care of the rest and have you not burn out during the exam (but very shortly after though ;-)). Edit: To add to that, all exams I did (for all three levels) during final prep every day I had struggles to stay focused. But exam day was over before I knew it. All those instances were the shortest 2x3 hours I’ve ever lived.
My one recommendation is don’t look at the clock. I get stressed when I keep looking at the clock. I haven’t done a full mock exam yet, but I’ve been doing sections (like 10 ethics questions) and timing myself on them and what I’m doing is going through the questions without looking at the clock. When I finish, I’ll look up and then decide how I need to adjust. What I found is that when I do that I actually end up doing better both on the questions and in terms of time. When I look at the clock, I kept trying to rush because my feeling was that I was about to run out of time.
I don’t stress out because of clock. I’m okay with timing. I get stressed out because of number of questions left. It is hard not to look at the number of the questions, when it is in front of your face lol.
Is it better to do Ethics in the beginning or in the end? Who knows?
Ah then the trick is like magician said. Go from strong to weak. The strong ones will take less time, so you can easily finish them within a certain time frame. Then slowly keep going down until you get to your weakest questions. These are the ones that are probably going over your head or that you’ll have to guess on. So better to feel good that you know that you got the strong ones right because then you can feel like King Kong on a high when it comes to guessing.
It has always worked for me. If I’m doing a paper-based exam, I’ll always finish the strong and easy questions first because I know that there is no way in hell I got them wrong.
My process is to start from the beginning. If within 5 seconds of the reading the question, I don’t know the answer or how to find the answer, I move on. Of course with CFA, from what I’ve heard since I haven’t written the exams, the questions are divided into sections. So I would just skip an entire section if I know it’s my weak spot.
Run a few miles and eat light before the exam. Brain functions better when you’re hungry and running clears your head and activates your brain in some weird way, I’ve read. Works miracles for me.
good advice. I’m the exception. I literally didn’t sleep for days before the exam and ate like garbage. Passed with flying colors. Bottom line: if you know this stuff like the back of your hand, you’ll be fine.
I agree. By the end of the day, you need to know and understand the material well to pass. No preparation will make a difference if you haven’t studied enough. For L2, I probably slept like 3hrs the night before because I was getting jittery about the exam and the early wake-up. Half-way through the PM section I was feeling like I was hangover. I ended up doing really well but it wasn’t a fun experience at all.