I know there is a thread dedicated to mock exams, but I feel the CFAI mock deserves its own thread, since it is perhaps the most representative of what we may see.
I just took this mock exam, and found it to be marginally more difficult than Schweser Book 2 Exam 1. I got 45 on AM and 44 on PM. As always, I made some stupid mistakes, which were balanced by lucky guesses. The ethics section was much more difficult than Schweser qbank and mocks in my opinion. the FRA vignettes (4) were on par with Schweser. Equity was a little harder than Schweser, but it really didn’t cover what I thought the core of Equity was.
What are your thoughts/opinions. For retakers, how did you find last year’s mock exam difficulty relative to the actual exam?
the people who set the questions did not take into account that we have a time limit on the exam. the equity and derivative itemsets were designed to fail the test takers rather than test our knowledge. I think the real exam will be based on the same topics that were asked on the mock so I would be studying that right now.
I thought I had a decent grasp on swaps until that mock. Did anyone else find the swap questions extremely difficult/convoluted? Question 7 on afternoon…why does the answer treat it as a semiannual pay? I don’t believe it mentions anything about the frequency of payments in the passage.
Anybody have last year’s 2012 Level II mock exam? I need the afternoon answers. If somebody has those saved and could e-mail them to fn3785@yahoo.com that would be GREATLY appreciated.
The afternoon derivatives section was a doozy. I got 6/6 on the AM, but the PM was extremely confusing to me.
OAS2160 - I got that question wrong. I’m not sure why the semi-annual assumption was made. However, I guess it is since the replication is based off of two fixed rate bonds (generally pay semiannual cpns).
I thought the same but the swap in Q7 is hedging a floating line of credit and they even mention that polish rates will rise in Q4. The vignette only starts talking about bonds when referring to raising capital for the 2nd project in latvia.
or could it be because they’re not anticipating the polish rates to rise until Q4, ie flat for at least 6 months?
or are you just supposed to assume that its semi annual because the alternative 2 is swaption in 6 months?
looking on the bright side, I’ve learned my lesson about getting trapped by a tricky question early on, i ended up spending about 20 mins trying to answer 6 and 7, had to rush the rest of the paper and dropped marks needlessly.