Difficulty of the actual exam?

CFA Level II
#1

Hi,

Could anyone advise the difficulty of the actual exam?

I felt Level 1 exams were pretty straightforward with the answers and just wondering if Level 2 is going to be similar to it.

Thanks in advance!

#2

It’s hard. Level 1 is nothing compared to level 2. If level 1 is a 5km race with old people, level 2 is a 20 mile race through a swamp filled with crocodiles and pyranhas. I’d say the CFAI mocks are good indications of what you can expect in the exam.

#3

Depends on how much you are prepared.

#4

I actually disagree to some extent. Although some sections on the exam were hard, most of the exam was pretty straightforward. It was nothing like the CFAI Mock. I would say of all the mocks i took (Schweser, CFAI, IFT), IFT came closest to the actual exam. But then again, your level of prep matters. I found L1 hard, because i wasn’t prepared.

Bottom line - If you are fairly well prepared, you should find the exam quite doable.

#5

Thank you for your comments. I tried IFT and found it somewhat straightforward.

#6

Lvl 2 retaker here. Was doing practice problems in the CFA website and I found them to be very representative of - or maybe a hair more difficult than - the difficulty of the actual exam.

#7

i found the online questions extremely hard, much more difficult than the end of chapter problems in the CFAI books or schweser books…havent done any CFAI mocks yet though.

#8

In my opinion, Schweser end of chapter questions are not representative at all. They seem to be too easy for me. CFAI online test are harder, but Schweser Practice Exams are the hardest. Some difficulties for me are related to not clear questions in Schweser. Sometimes it’s not clear that you should take this or that from a particular exhibit in the case if it’s not mentioned in the question (e.g. use LIBOR rates from another exhibit). Sometimes there are tricky wordings and you should deal with text puzzles as well (e.g. "a client asked to buy bond and portfolio manager bought bonds. What is the violation? -He asked to buy a bond not bond S ))) " ).

Based on my experience of CFA L1 exam I expect the followings for CFA L2:

  • difficulty is similar or lower than CFAI, and significantly lower than Schweser Practice Exams
  • clear and straightforward wording
  • focus on core concept (very few “special” questions)
#9

+1 to that. Absolutely NONE of this is rocket science and hard to understand in and of itself. The difficulty comes down to - in my opinion - how much you have to dig through the vignette. And the fact that everything is a story.

Level 1 isn’t “easier” at all. Really the difficulty of the topics between L1 and L2 is very similar. OMG you have to calculate options spread payoffs at L2!! there’s probably a million L1 candidates that could tell you breakeven for a bull put spread without even doing the readings.

The only easier thing about L1 is that every question is presented to the person in like 2 sentences max.

Let’s all stop over complicating this exam.

#10

Last year, the CFA official mock and Schweser mocks were all harder than the real thing. Well the AM at least. PM killed everyone, but all that matters is that you do better than half the people!

Most of the topic tests on the CFA website were also harder than the real thing