I thought a.m. was more difficult than I anticipated, but felt pm was easier than anticipated. Hopefully I didn’t miss a bunch of curve balls!
I left like 20 points worth of questions blank on AM because I didn’t finish. So I think I failed band 10.
I agree the multiple choice was tame. But that could mean we fell for tricks. I’m predicting a band 10 because I think I did 45/60 on the MC and 90/180 on the essay.
Felt really good about am. Didn’t know a 5 point question so just filled in some stuff hoping for 1 point but otherwise felt good or ok about everything else and finished with around 10 minutes to spare.
I actually thought pm was quite difficult. Scores 73/78 on cfai mocks and almost certainly did worse on this. Thinking 67-70 something like that but definitely with risk to the downside.
AM roofied me and proceeded to plow me behind the dumpster. PM wrapped a blanket around me and told me everything was going to be ok.
1st page
Afternoon was a vacation to Normandy. Finished an hour early and took a nap.
Morning was Normandy in June 1943.
Even though most of the questions were straightforward, who else felt a major time crunch around halfway through the AM?
I thought morning wasn’t too bad besides 3-4 sub parts kinda guessed/ made shit up to hopefully get a point . Afternoon was tougher for me probably 38/60.
2 people in Boston got a violation before test even started for being in bathroom too long and it was holding up the whole room classic
I actually felt pretty good about the AM. I was writing basically the entire 3 hours which I expected from the mocks. I remember thinking a few questions were non-standard compared to the last 6 years of AMs but were still reasonable to figure out (although I suppose we’ll find out on results day if I actually did). I remember leaving parts of 3 sub questions blank (well 2 blank and 1 with a single comment that I knew was wrong), but at the end I had like 3 minutes to go back and fill something in. I kinda had to use “gut feelings” on them which wasn’t ideal, but then again a blank gets 0 regardless so I couldn’t have hurt myself by doing so.
The PM half felt harder than I expected. Ethics always feels like a crapshoot and after Level 2 I learned not to rely on it. The non-Ethics questions weren’t too terrible, and I felt like I was sure on most of them.
All in, it felt like a pass, but with these exams you never really know for sure. But I feel I did my best and I feel like I knew a lot of answers on the exam, and that’s really all I can hope for.
Now the wait begins…
I think we all did something like that. Blank gets zero so scribble something and get a point maybe. The insane breadth of the AM…i feel like you had to.
Yeah. I just hope all this was enough. 
Like everyone else, wrote for 3 hours straight in the AM. Was writing really fast from the get go, I think that’s what saved me. 1st 5 questions were ok then it went downhill. Left a 8 mark and 5 mark sub question blank. I mean, you gotta know when to let go. Even if I spent the entire AM on those questions I wouldn’t know what to do, so just take the hit and concentrate on other areas where you have hope.
PM was fine. Overall, tough but fair. I was feeling quite calm, hopefully it’s a pass but it depends on how good everyone does too.
My test centre was in Hong Kong. This girl beside me brought a small bottle of flower oil with her and sniffed out of it before the start of the AM exam. Is that allowed?
lol sniffing glue before the cfa
Maybe she considers it a required medicine? Otherwise, I would think it’s not allowed.
Wow, seriously?! Crappy way to pick up a violation. In Philly, in the morning the proctor asked the attendants to clear the bathrooms and what does one lame brain do? He gets up and starts heading to the bathroom! The proctor sees this and literally calls the guy out over the loudspeaker and tells him to go back to his seat. Looked like he might have come from one of the level 1 sections…
my revision wasnt solid like for L2. for L2 i had a fail proof solid revision. i knew id kill it.
L3. i was already walking in knowing i have holes in my review. i.e. i skipped many sections but made sure i had enough practice on others. So 2 things happened.
The ones that i skipped. showed up for sure. and they showed up in their simple form. i.e. plug n chug form almost but i struggled because i flippin skipped them lol
the other ones that i didnt skip during review showed up in their extreme “variant” forms. i.e. yes i know what it is but ive never seen a variation of this sort in the book nor the past papers.
that overall effect would sink me. and im ok with it. atleast had i not skipped areas, id have a very decent chance otherwise.
PM: i thought it was alot trickier than normal. i felt i guessed on quite a few. i.e. some portions of asset allocation and institutional lol.
overall i enjoyed the process. im down to re-do it again. it was a good challenge. def not rocket science but i think a decent preparation should do it. Also i write in Ottawa. literally there were about 300 kids in the hall. only 30ish were L3 and the rest were all L1 n L2.
many empty seats in L3 section too.
It was way easier than i expected. finished morning paper with time to go back over the 12 marks i had skipped. still didnt know the answer so i just put my best guess n hoped for partial marks PM paper felt easier than the ones i did for practice but u never really know. im hoping all my practice is why i felt the paper was better than i had anticipated. failed for the first time last year on level 3 n really put in a whole lot more work to ensure this is the last of this hellish programme
I thought overall the test wasn’t so bad. If I had to guess, I got maybe in the 67-70 range or thereabouts for total aggregate so hope that should be enough.
Spent most of the 3 hrs on the AM which was to be expected as I was writing slow so as to increase the legibility. Were a part of two different questions I didn’t know/remember so I took my best shot but overall I got something down for everything.
PM wasn’t so bad, were like 4 or 5 questions that wasn’t sure about. Finished about 45 mins early and just went back through which was good because I realized I misread one of the questions so was the only answer I changed.
Wow that’s not a lot of folks. In Philly there were 22 sections total with 4 of them being for Lv3. Each section had a max seating of 64 people but I know in Lv1 and Lv2 there were more than just a few empty seats. If I had to guess, there were about 1000-1200 people total in there.
For just lv3, most of the sections were filled, with only a few seats empty in each so I would say about 225-230 Lv3 takers. Interestingly in my section when I was checking back in for the PM, I noticed on the attendance sheet that one person didn’t show up. Wondering how many lv3 folks did that…
I had a similar feeling too. 1st 5 question are ok, but then was getting harder and trickier. I also left an 8 mark and 5 mark sub question. So, I think the AM section is harder than expected.
PM was easy, except ethnics, which I feel very uncomfortable and not comparable to our practices / mock. Other than than, question are relatively easy than I thought.
Hopefully PM section can make up for AM.
I think flower oil not allow, unless it’s classified as medicine.
I felt pretty ok after AM; didn’t know a couple things but didn’t leave them blank either. The PM completely threw me off! It was SOOO full of tricks from the beginning to the end! I eneded up guessing about 6-8 questions easily out of 60. Don’t feel too great after PM.
yea PM was tricky af