scale 1 to 10

how would you rate the difficulty in your mind of both sessions 1 being easiest and 10 hardest?

i would say AM - 8

PM - 6 (except for the first 6 questions of ethics, what the hell was that?)

Difficulty due to the content or to the lack of time?

AM - 7 (Needed more time to finish; a couple of curve balls that required to switch answers)

PM - 8 (Poor structure between quantitative vs qualitative. I had run out of energy and time for the quantitative in the end of the exam. A lot curve balls and traps

Interesting to have that metric, I would say:

AM - 5 (felt really confident after it as there was nothing I didn’t know, even though I finished just 1min before the countdown so no time to review)

PM - 9 (found it very tricky & more difficult than the 2019 PM mock where I got a 41/60; I had to educate-guess 24+ questions)

You’re all making me worry because I don’t remember any curveballs or tricks in PM…

Rating:

AM: 7

PM: 5

AM being difficult mostly due to time constraint.

AM : 6

PM : 5

AM: 6 (much more quantitative than expected but in AM I did well at least for time management)

PM: 7 (Econ/Ethics/Equity were difficult which should require a clear understanding of the material)

Best luck!

AM-8.5

PM-6.5

AM 6

PM 8

i guess PM was easy too but as time passed towards the end I grew tired and brain completely shut down the last hour or so.

AM - 6 and PM - 8.5

AM was constrained by time while in the PM part neurons almost stopped working. AM had questions that were mostly straight forward while some googly while PM has scores of bizarre questions.

A combination of above two for the PM part made it extra difficult.

5 for both AM and PM – Both sessions had a fair mix of easy and hard questions. They just really made you read between the lines this time around. I could not imagine having to take this test and not being a native English speaker. For all you non-native English speakers that sat for the exam, I tip my hat to you because taking this beast of a test is one thing, but taking it in a foreign language is just insane!

Which leads me to my next question; does anyone think that native English speaks have a slight advantage (granted they finish and possess average level III candidate knowledge).

I would love to know the proportion of native English speakers that pass level III compared to non-native English speakers.

Yes absolutely. As for me:

  • I’m a non-native English speaker and … freshman for Level III
  • I used to prepare for this test half in English (Schweser Notes plus some EOCs) + half in Chinese (which I think was time-saving but definitely not perfect due to the nature of AM questions) - as you know English is totally different from Chinese!
  • I regret that I hadn’t practiced timed AM mocks until 15 June (before that I only went through all the reference solutions to 2018/17/16/15/14 AM questions and forced myself to extract a few of key words from every guideline answer

I’d love to know how most westerners prepared for Level III if you could generously share some points on this.

Best of luck for us.

[Editors note: I guess the variable native/non-native speaker does matter for Level I but for Level III candidates this may not be a statistically significant issue on the whole]

Non-native speaker and retaker here.

I actually don’t see a much difference here as I have my master degree in USA and CPA.

There is definitely advantage for native speakers. But as CFA exam is tested is English and well known around the world, it doesn’t really matter that much. As a non-native speaker, I want to be competitive on the job market and thus I start on this journey.

I woould say, we have more advantage once we finish the CFA jorunay as we can speak at least one more language than native speaker.

Regarding the preparation, I stick to CFAI material and supplement with MM and Level up (for first time).

I feel I am more prepared this time, but I am not 100% confidence I will pass. You just don’t know as the result is the score relative to all the test takers. If I pass, I definitely would share some tips and preparation strategy for next batch of level 3 candidate.

Non-native speaker, as well.

To me the difficulty was that the studying part of my preparation was significantly longer than for levels 1 and 2, because it is not sufficient to understand a concept in your head, but you have to write them with the expected key words. So I had to let’s say write out (or tell out loud) the definition for a bias for 5 times, to be sure I would be able to do it on the exam.

For levels 1 and 2 you will have the answer choices there. You just have to choose, so if you know the answer in your head no need to formulate a sentence from it.

Conclusion: I had to study more, less time was left for exam specific preparation, I could not do half of practice I planned to.

I ran out of time on the AM but it’s more due to lack of sufficient preparation and not the language.

Although, I must say I have the habit of mixing up almost unrelated words under stress. Like I write recapitalize instead of rebalance. Which is dangerous, I’ve no idea if anyone else none native speaker does such a thing…

Morning: 5

Afternoon: 7

Got lost on a know-it-or-your-sunk formula early in the morning for a 4 pointer and BSed my way to another 0/8 on the same topic. Overall thought it was pretty straight forward and despite what somebody else said, pretty heavy on the calculator. Which was A-OK with me.

PM seemed tricky but in hindsight actually wasn’t that bad. Definitely puked on half a dozen questions but otherwise seemed reasonable. Would be surprised if I tanked unless I bubbled incorrectly due to skipping a question early. And on that note can I request for future candidates that we provide more than 1/20th of a millimeter in between the bubbles? Would make it much more user friendly.

I really don’t think it makes a difference whether you are a native speaker or not. As long as your English is proficient (which all the non native speakers above have demonstrated; you guys are totally fine), you are not any less or more than native speakers.

My test centre (Hong Kong) had level 2 and 3 in one room, and when the 2s were instructed to open their books, this guy in our section opened his book. He claimed to the proctor he didn’t know. Now I would say that guy may be in a disadvantageous position compared to native speakers.

I’ve been taking the tests in Tokyo the last two years and almost the same thing happened with the books last year. Almost EVERYONE opened their books when the announcer only told them to flip it over. Proctors didn’t really react at all.

I hear horror stories about proctors in the US being on power trips, writing people up for slightest of infractions but the ones in Japan seem less concerned about that. Maybe a cultural thing.

I also think maybe they make the multiple choice parts of the test 3 hours with non-native speakers in mind. I’ve been able to get through the multiple choice parts with at least and hour or so left for all the levels so far, so I could imagine it takes a non native a bit more to read through it all.

Anyway for the topic of the thread, I would say AM 8 and PM 7.

I thought they were equal in difficulty.

AM: 4.5

PM: 8.5

AM - 3

PM - 7

AM - 8

PM - 7