Anyone doing the CFAI study plan with the practice questions… holy cow, they are hard… I normally get 75-90% on all the scheweser qbank material and just started CFAI practice questions. each one is so involving… getting about 50-60% right only.
Hows everoyne experience with that practice questions?
Still have not started with problems but I expect to start practicing in about 3 weeks.
Referring to your question, IMO, difficulty is subjective because percentile rank is a much better performance indicator than hit rate on the online platform. Your good or weak hit rate could be due to question difficulty but ultimately you are competing against at least 53% candidates, as pass rate is 47% for L2.
Your hit rate could be 80% but if you are beating only 20% of the pool, what worth is the hit rate? However, if you are currently beating 75% of candidates you will be more than fine I would reckon that exam questions will be easier so that proper grading curve can be set.
Therefore, I would not worry about hit rate as there is plenty of time and better performance indicator.
Hope it helps.
I am not through all of the material yet, but so far I have found schweser question to be about as difficult as CFAI questions.
i disagree. Schweser is more friendly and CFAI questions are more challenging.
The main thing is, schweser quetions are very straight forward and usually easy to understand. For example, it will ask for the operating cash flow for and present the information – if you know the formulas, its easy.
CFAI questions are another animal. Half the time, I’m trying to interpret what the **** the question is even asking…Then looking through 5 paragaphs to find out how what I think they may be trying to ask lol. I found the practice problems to be of that type…
However, the CFAI mock questions are pretty straightforward so I think thats how the test questions will actually be.
Band 10, level 2 retaker here. CFAI online topic questions are more challenging and have more wording than the actual exam - at least that’s my experience. With that said, they’re obviously great practice. They revamped the website this year, and its 100x better. I’ll be attempting all the online questions at least once.
Other prep providers Qbanks are helpful to remember certain concepts and formulas, never hurts to answer as many questions as possible
Curious if you have any advice for first time takers - any strategies that you’d recommend or recommend avoiding?
No crazy strategy here - just master FRA, Equity, Fixed Income, and CF and aim for >70% in those. Then take as many practice exams as you can get your hands on to get use to the vignette format.
Last year I think fell just short because I spent too much time trying to master topics like PM, Alt, and Quant. While you should have a great understanding of those topics, they’re not necessarily going to make or break you. And don’t forgot to practice Ethics.
Just my 2 cents.
how many mocks did you end up doing last year? And are you planning to do more (I.e. a greater number of them) this go-around?
Any resource in particular that you used to practice Ethics? Seems like there is only 60 questions online and 20 questions in the book (vignette type) which isn’t really enough for me.
Between CFAI, Schweser, and IFT mocks - I think I did about 5 last year. I’m adding Wiley as well this year and aiming to do more, I personally think its the best way to study/practice the last 1.5 months.
For the question on Ethics, I guess just buy more Mocks? Each session will have at least one vignette.
The only ones I did are for Derivatives (because books didn’t have any practice questions). Some of them were crazy (like fixed-fixed currency swap valuation where the discount rates weren’t given. I don’t know if something like this would even appear on the exam because it’s so time consuming).
I’m about to pull the trigger on more mocks and more “question banks”… I already with Kaplan Schweser.
Which would you go with between IFT and Wiley? The price is close, IFT has 2000 questions and 6 full mocks while wiley has 1200 questions and 2 full mocks.
I’m not really interested in stupid 2 sentence questions like Schweser’s qbank since they’re too easy. I assume of those thousand questions, most will be just quick drill questions right? Some the only meaningful are the mocks? How are IFT mocks?
Eh, im probably going to get both Wiley and IFT mocks… That, combined with Kaplan and CFA should be enough.
I did 14 mocks on L1, i like mocks!
Okay I picked up the Wiley qbank and mocks for 2 billz.
Did 20 FRA qbanks and 20 Corporate Finance qbanks. So far, are a few vignettes but mostly short paragraph questions. The difficulty is similar to schweser with some concepts that I felt were missing in schweser such as goodwill and MM calcuations (with just the 40 questions I tried so far)
Well, I think this will be a good supplement.