What is the optimal way to study for this. The EOC questions in the CFA book seem really easy. I got like 95% (the ones that are short EOC questions) yet I seem to struggle on the day with below 50 usually.
Any advice on how strong performers in this area became this way?
That’s a very tough situation to be in… I’m guessing you don’t even know why you are scoring below 50 on the exam which doesn’t help in figuring out what went wrong…
I would just recommend what everyone else usually recommends, do as many practice questions as you can. The more scenarios you are exposed to, the more chances to score better on the exam (hopefully).
I find my slip up’s are simply not QUITE knowing the exact technicalities of specific situations. I could always boil it down to two answers then It felt hazy.
eithics is scary at levels 2 and 3 because you never know how youre doing. your 2/6s will fundamentally feel the same as your 5/6s. you just have no idea. at least i dont.
can’t say anything about AMC since this is a new topic (new compared to level 1 and 2)
for code of ethics and standards of professional conduct, it’s about reading the vignette. a single word will break or make your score.
keep doing practice problems, preferably ones that CFAI wrote. after enough practice, you’ll start to develop a “gut feeling” which most of the times is right.
While I’ve consistently scored above 70% I’ve had several times (AM on the 2018 mock) where I absolutely bombed it. I was doing poor in ethics before but found going through the examples in the CFAI textbook and writing exactly why it was right or wrong helped a lot. It preps you to kind of think of the questions in terms of what they look for. It’ll take a couple hours but at the end you’ll feel much better about it.
Go through every word of the blue-box examples! I’ve found that exam questions tend to be similar to the blue-box examples, so make sure you understand any mistakes that you’ve made as well.
I’ve scored 70+ in Ethics at all three exam levels, including my Level 2 fail in 2015. Mainly I just read the material, twice at each level, and read the example cases and reasoning behind the answers very carefully. Ethics requires a bit more feel than other quantitative subjects. After some practice you get used to how the exam writers weave information into the cases and how to identify what they’re getting at and the answer they’re looking for. It requires applying some intuition and educated guessing sometimes.
On exam day, I always underlined information I thought was important and specifically relevant to the code and standards. Minor technique bit I think it helped me.
Anyone has a decent summary that beats rereading the cfai text for the n’th time and a endless practise questions?
Google Sites - CFA L3Notes - Not 100% up to date but ethics doesn’t change a great deal - nicely boiled down notes.
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Thaaaanks.
Good recap and entertainingly (is this a word?) written. Ethics part is great.
#cheat