I thought it was tough but fair. If I end up failing I have nothing to blame but myself. Just couldn’t recall formulas and concepts.
To me the morning and afternoon sessions are equal in terms of difficulty.
a bit harder then I expected, I found the AM easy but I think I got screwed in the PM!
Much easier than I expected.
AM was very easy. Pm was tougher but not overly difficult. A couple questions threw me for a loop. Ethics was the only section I had a tough time with.
AM was easy and very fair but PM absolutely wrecked me. I’m disappointed with the exam overall because I found it didn’t properly assess the knowledge you got from the readings. Almost nothing on currency, equity valuation, derivative valuation and others. Basically nothing on the core stuff but a lot of obscure things that in the grand scheme of things aren’t particularly important.
The mocks and TT were very misleading to the exam. They asked similar types of questions and the exam questions were nothing like it.
I found the Cfai mock to be the best and most fair. It was tough but it asked important questions that really tested your ability.
I think I did well, but it’s tough to tell. I had the same feeling after L1. Looking forward to getting my life back for a few months
I think fatigue kicks in which makes PM relatively tougher. To make matters worse, we weren’t released from the AM session till 12:30. Really had to rush through lunch while reviewing formulas for the PM session.
Tough, esp PM. Did well in quant and equity, terrible in econ and derivatives - I think I got a 0 in derivatives, tbh. As for ethics: ??? Who knows. Usually one of my strong subjects, but I found that hard as well. I don’t think I put together a passing score so i’m pretty disappointed right now. There were just too many questions I had to guess on and formulas I couldn’t remember.
Exam was fair in terms of difficulty as nothing was asked out of the books. But CFAI made it clear if you are not equally prepared nuff in all chapters, you are not ready for L2.
A tough morning derivatives section was adjusted with an easy afternoon. And I found ethics to be trickier ( one of my strongest), AInv was little tougher than the TTs and mocks.
Hope i will make the cut, fingers crossed.
I think ethics, FI, and Der. were Brutal. Brutal!!! I consistently scored 70 to 90% on ethics on my mock exams. But during the actual exam, I was asking myself where are these Ethics questions coming from? This is my third time taking level two, and I believe it was the hardest of all three. The AM portion was fair, but the P.m. portion was murder. I definitely think I did well enough to score 66%+ on statistics, FRA, equity, alternative investments, corporate finance; But, I definitely failed fixed income and derivatives. Portfolio management and econ. probably 50 to 66%. Band 8 or 9 would not surprise me. I went in prepared, but this exam really got under my skin. By the end of the a.m. portion I could feel the fatigue. God bless your mind and heart if you’re a first-time taker and pass this exam. You deserve to manage $1 billion and make $10 million a year in fees. You are a genius…
Found AM quite easy, PM was tough. There was a surprising amount of trick questions that probably weren’t obvious at first glance.
For some reason i couldnt get my head around some of the Ethics/Quant questions in PM (Derivs was fine for me as i work in derivs)
I thought it was tough but relatively fair. I did find some of the topics seemed to focus on more obscure subtopics and you either knew them or didn’t. Guess the beauty of a scaled test is it is all relative.
Anyone agree that there was one quant question that could not be solved? I knew the formula to compute the answer, but the information was not given. That just what i think…
“Anyone agree that there was one quant question that could not be solved?” - not sure which you mean. Quant is my strongest subject and I usually get five or six correct on the PEs but there were a few tricky ones on this exam.
There was also an indirect equity problem whose typical plug n’ play calculation didn’t exactly fit the closest answer but was close enough to maybe think “screw it, close enough”. Fortunately I had enough time to revisit this question and think I had a eureka moment where I realized the “trick”.
There were also a few quantitative questions that should’ve been solved qualitatively because otherwise you would’ve spent a lot of cycles dredging up the esoteric formulas and calculating it.
Overall I think the exam was tough but fair. Much more than the FRM exams which are far more complex than their PEs and arguably unfair.
Loveeee the weighting they chose for derivatives, NOT. Also, the quant was so odd and random in terms of the questions. Felt like I was being asked Level 1 stuff in the AM for quant…? Rest of the exam was pretty fair to be honest though. I crushed FRA, Equity, did decent in Ethics, CF, AI, and PM. Gonna be so pissed if I fail and it is because of quant and derivatives. you all KNOW how much those two made up the weighting of the entire exam…Also, econ was pretty tough but not unfair I don’t think. If I passed, it will be because they cared about my Equity and FRA performance. There were maybe 2 or 3 questions tops in those sections that I wasn’t 100 percent sure of.
I think all of them were answerable, i found 1 wrong though in my answer as soon as i came out of the hall. 
There was definitely one where you had to make an intermediate calculation in order to evaluate the question. As an alternative, you could have qualitatively reviewed the data provided and made a very good educated guess.
That’s what i ended up doing and think it’s what the exam required.
I guess I’ll chime in. I found the morning reasonably straightforward. I think the only vignette where I had some serious doubts about myself was ethics (which is annoying because I consider that to be one of my stronger areas). But overall I went to lunch feeling pretty comfortable with how I did.
The afternoon was definitely harder. I got cooked on Corporate Finance (which was again annoying because I also consider that a strength). I know for sure I got one question right in that afternoon CF vignette but the other 5…yeah, I just didn’t want to look.
On the whole, I felt that FRA wasn’t too bad. Definitely my weakest area but I practiced it a lot going into the exam and honestly I felt it was very routine (I didn’t feel FRA tried to trick anyone). FI, derivatives, Equities, AI, Portfolio Management, Quant I thought all went well.
On my mocks I was scoring 67%-73% (over 4 mocks) and this felt the same way to me. So hopefully the score reflects that…
I thought accounting and derivatives were MUCH easier than what they could have been. Overall the exam was tough but not more difficult than any of the 4 Schweser exams I took. Much easier than topic tests. By order of magnitude.
I was getting anywhere from 75/120s to 91/120s on mocks. So I am hoping that I am on the passing side of things. Band 9 retaker and last year I never cracked 60% on a full mock.
Gonna be frustrating if I fail again.