So what is the verdict? How difficult did you actually find the exam. Did the strategy of taking number of mock exam pay off? Which practice exam did u find closest, in terms of toughness, to the actual exam
And one more question, how many of you were taken by a surprise after viewing that one extra item set from a subject which historically has only been 5% of exam.
PS: Please don’t discuss a particular topic which was tested in the exam
History doesn’t matter, as long as its within the band its perfectly fine. Exam wasn’t difficult, but AM definitely was harder due to quite a few of traps hidden in there
should i be feeling bad that i didnt find too many tricks in either section? 
What was the topic that had a higher weighting?
You can throw me into that group! (I think…if we’re talking about the same topic) I found the one of those two to be very difficult and I bombed it.
I don’t think the rest of the exam was too bad in terms of difficulty. Seemed comparable to EOC questions from the book. Elan mocks and pre-2014 CFA mocks were more difficult. I think I nailed the heavy weight topics and outside of one or two item sets, I think I did well but who knows…maybe I fell for a lot of tricks and I’m normally surprised by my scores in Ethics due to the trickiness of the topic. I didn’t notice any difference in difficulty between the AM and PM.
The one thing that struck me, and I should have noticed after taking 7-8 mocks, was that I probably spent ~25-30% of my total time devoted to this exam studying things that weren’t covered by a single question on the exam.
Outside of a few vignettes, felt like I knew the basics of each vignette (did LOC’s 2x) probably because I was better prepared than last year. Have no idea if I passed or not. What bothers me is I couldn’t get some problems to work out even though I knew the formula, etc, probably hurt me that I didn’t have time to do any mocks. Wish they would give L2 2x a year, because I forget so much from a year ago.
“The one thing that struck me, and I should have noticed after taking 7-8 mocks, was that I probably spent ~25-30% of my total time devoted to this exam studying things that weren’t covered by a single question on the exam.”
This happened to me as well and was especially frustrating…
portfolio management was brutal.
the level of difficulty was on par with EOC (I didn’t do any mock exams at all lol), there were a few harder ones, but i think it was a very fair test.
people talking about “traps” all the time, which makes me nervous…
So at any point during the exam you thought " oh lord i should have considered solving those mocks" or were you like " Glad i didn’t waste a day on mocks, heck this is easy"
The exam is what it is. After I walked out of the afternoon session, I went upstairs to the post-exam cocktail party the local society hosted. Ordered a scotch on the rocks, took no time drinking it all, walked across the street to a bar to meet a buddy that’s already a charterholder where he had a double shot of patron silver waiting on me and we watched the Belmont race.
I agree for the PM part, it was brutal and in my opinion not fair from CFAI side.
^ isn’t this 7A? I would modify it. I mean the quote from providence
Yes it’s a violation … Please delete it from the quote
I do agree that some of things that were tested heavily in the mocks, at least the Schweser mocks did not appear on the exam, which I found to be very shocking. I found the exam overall, to be what I expected it to be, but I still have no clue how I did.
Some one mentioned that the actual exam was simplier (but tricky) than schweser mocks. Do you agree?
Sorry, I know you guys don’t want to hear this but I disagree with the “not fair from CFAI” part of the comment. I think I did decent on the PM sections because I do remember going over the specific things that they asked for in a lot of detail in the materials. It is, however, impossible to do if you haven’t directly studied the material. It was tough, but to say “not fair” is in my opinion incorrect.
I second that; Knew Most of the stuff but still have NO clue how I did; I really enjoyed the exam
I concur.
I do agree with that. I thought the same after L1 too to be honest. i feel that the Schweser mocks are always too wordy and the CFAI questions are more to the point. However I have always used Schweser and for the way I learn it works well for me, so that’s why I continue to stick with them. I also go ahead and figure that if I am doing decent on their mocks, the exam should not be a complete shock to me.