Congratulations to all who passed and a quick message to those who failed:
I failed misreably in 2018 and thought about skipping a year amongst all the other negative thoughts going on in your mind at this time. Truth was I was not prepared compared to my competition.
In 2019, I scored over 90th percentile. All I am trying to say is don’t give up and identity the weakness in your study plan. Sometimes the weakness is not dedicating enough time to the study process after falsely believing that Level 3 is easy. Level 3 is the easiest material and the hardest exam. If you require assistance with the study plan, please let me know and I can go into the specifics.
Chin up and work harder boys and girls. Will see you guys on the other side in 2020
This year was my first attempt, I studied really hard for 8 months. My feeling was I know everything. I practiced past 2010-2018 AM sessions + Schweser mocks.
However, I failed, AM session 35 (30th percentile) and PM session 80 (around 80th percentile). I was pretty confident in my AM responses and end result totally shocked me.
Is there any key to answer AM? maybe key words they are looking for?
As of now I am totally unaware what mistakes I made in AM and I don’t know how to approach it next time. Feeling is that if I take next year, I might still fail AM, because in my opinion responses I made were correct. I just don’t know what went wrong. This frustrates me.
There should be some guidance on how to pass AM and simply practicing past papers + mocks didn’t help me this time.
In 2018, I used schweser and studied for about 4 months, which also included giving CfA mock exams, blue box, eoc etc. On June 23, 2018 I got destroyed in the morning and I knew I will fail (less than 10 percentile on AM). I realized that level 3 is more detailed and I need to change my strategy.
In 2019, I decided to study through the CFA textbooks and LevelUp (videos, slide books, bootcamp). Trust me, what you learn and pick up through CFA curriculum in combination with LevelUp materials is indispensable. Came the exam day and I was sailing through because I knew the materials inside out for the most part. Leave the last 2 months for review. Do all of these 5 times - eoc, blue box, white text, mocks. Maybe an overkill, but I didn’t want to do this again.
Highly recommend LevelUp and CFA materials. Marc from LevelUp will give you key words that graders are looking for and all of this is in the CFA curriculum. His bootcamps, videos, books will all focus on AM preparation in particular.
Through the process don’t forget to exercise, eat healthy, sleep (hard to do this). If you are fresh and healthy you will retain more and application of materials will be a lot better.
Also, just to add that I have nothing against Schweser. Many people have passed Level 3 using them. However, I wanted to get into more details from a knowledge perspective, which in all cases will lead to good results on the exam.