Oh and by the way I left 26 points blank on the AM. So whatever that’s worth…
It’s a tough day for retakers like myself who didn’t make it. Even tougher if scores are lower than first attempt. And toughest when deep down you know that u put less effort/ had less conceptual understanding for Levels 1 and 2 and passed them. How is it possible?
Fortunately, I always write a note to myself immediately after the exam to help me introspect. Here were my findings which you may find useful.
23 June - 7 pm Morning - Performance was better than last year, but still some gaps. Large issues with timing. I couldn’t finish about 45-50 marks of the exam (completely missed FI and only managed part RM) so theoretically, will be marked out of 135. Assuming that I got 70% of my questions right, that puts my best score at 95. Most of my answers made sense, but worst case scenario is 80. If it’s 80, it will be disastrous, as i did better in 2017.
Afternoon- I expected this to be easy, but it was twisted. Also, thought I could make up for the low score in FI and RM in the morning by acing the afternoon, but it wasn’t to be. Last year, where I was highly optimistic about the afternoon exam, I landed up only in the low 60s. Given how many guesses I had to take this year, and difficulty with ethics, I believe my score will be close to 60%.
Overall - Expectation is that I will score a minimum of 55% and maximum of 60%. This is interesting, because at 60% I have a chance of passing Level 3, but at 55, I know I will land up with a similar result like last year. Hoping and praying that I can somehow score 100/180 in the morning and 38/60 in the afternoon. That should get me there with 59%.
28 August 2018
Morning 40-42%
Afternoon 60-62%
Overall - 50-51%
Did Not Pass
Boom! Killer morning. 70-75 it was. Lower than last year. Confused but entirely plausible. Afternoon was off slightly. No chance to recover. Shouldn’t have left out so many marks, but had no option, speed was slow. Had worked through individual topics pre exam, so never practiced under exam conditions. Biggest mistake. There’s no point if I understand a lot more than I did a year ago, if I take too much time to complete the questions!! I knew this going into the exam. Knew I had not changed my strategy and stuck to similar study pattern like previous year, and result was exactly the same. Not to mention 70 hrs of studying in second attempt vs 200 in first. So here’s what I am going to do:
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Give this exam one more try, this time 50-50 time on practice questions and revision
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Only CFAI curriculum. At the very least, only CFAI tests and questions
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Put in at least 250 hours
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If I fail to change my approach and strategy, I will not turn up on exam day - I should have done it this year.
I also want to add that I don’t think leaving big questions blank is a definite fail. I can stand testament to that.
I left 17 marks COMPLETELY blank in derivatives. 6 marks completely blank in Fixed Income. and I am sure another 10 or so along the way in other areas too. I would say over 30 marks. But I guess the areas I did know i knew well.
Left 12 marks blank in AM, did casual mistake in 1 Equity subpart and 1 Econ subpart. ~ 20 Marks of worth nothing.
And if you look at the score distribution very few people was able to demonstrate great amount of knowledge in AM paper. Hence, if you can score ~75% in PM you should pass definitely, even with an avg AM. As I calculated (from few of my friends’ score) MPS was in 55-58% region.
Maybe my own experience will serve as well. I was one of the many retakers this year. As I ended up in Band 6 last year, while not terrible it was also not a close one! My key points from last year were:
1- I did not dig deep enough. I did not work on my mistakes in the AM exam as I was going through mock exams. The AM is a massive learning curve, so not retaking the AM mocks was a mistake.
2- I also ended up short in time to re-do mock exams. I had about 5 weeks of review prior to the exam. Mistake learnt and corrected: this year I took 8 - 9 weeks of pure revision. For me tat means: going through the CFAI books, EOC etc once. Then I will retake all the EOC which might take some 10 - 12 days. It’s a good refresher of al the material and sets me ready for the mock exams.
3- I gathered a LOT of Mocks (CFA mocks), probably going 7 - 9 years back with a large overweight on recent exams (recency effect? hint hint). I did them all at least twice, especially the AM mock exams.
4- I started studying mid October as opposed to end January! Massive change, as even putting 5 - 7hrs a week in the months October - February, it enabled me to plan better and have those precious 8 - 9 weeks of pure review prior to the exam.
5- Material. Only CFAI. I had some Schweser mocks but I did not found them that useful for some reason. However, any practice is welcome as even Schweser mocks they ultimately cover exam material and will only help towards exam day.
So for any retakers next year, my only tip will be to stick to your plan, pleeeenty of practice as stated above.
I note you wrote ’ put in at least 250 hours’…I think this is your main problem. My friend circle who passed Level 3 this year, including me, put in excess of 500 hours easily if not more. We really committed time to learning the material inside out to scrape a pass (myself anyway, others did quite well). I don’t think 250 hours suffices since this level is extrmely qualitative.
Hi Tommy,
I am in a similar position. I did approximately 8 to 10 mock exams and was consistently scoring over 70%. My PM papers were consistently around the 72 to 75% range. I would say the AM around the 60 to 70% range.
I walked out of the exam feeling pretty good about how it went.
On results day, I was excited to see how well I did and ‘I did not pass’. I can not get my head around it. The PM was around 60%. I was expecting 80%.
What makes me even more suspicious is that not one of the topic areas are over 70%, how is this possible after so many practice exams and a good exam day experience. Even taking in to account the tricks and traps, there are not that many to take every area below 70%… i scored close to 50% on all of them.
I am finding it really hard to accept the result… I think you have a pretty good feeling when you come out of an exam about if you might fluke it, or if you are borderline, or if you did really well… I felt I did really well and will struggle with this for a while and I will definitely try and get it looked at again if the CFAI will listen.
Yes, protect your ego at all costs! It certainly was the cfai conspiring against you, because everyone knows you are the specialest special person alive
Look, obviously this is not a good score, BUT do remember how close all candidates are to eachother. Everyone you compete with has already beat two levels. No one is showing up on exam day for fun and probably only a handful are ill-prepared because they had different expectations. Let’s say the minimum passing score is around 60% and 90th percentile given examples in the result thread is slightly above 70%, then the 10th percentile line is around 50%! That’s not a good score but it’s no disaster too and some more effort gets you there! This is not the same as a band 1 fail in L1 or L2!
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Around 45/60.
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None blank, but I did answer only with some pointscavenging scribbles for some FI questions
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Why exactly are you in doubt? If you have a borderline eligible job you might be able to find an eligible job on merits of passing all three exams. You’d be able to get the charter later
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Defo! See my points above Q1.
Thanks RS and sorry to hear your result. Your confidence interval around your score is a good indicator (the blue box surrounding your score line) This is the range for your results taking into account other factors. If your blue box is over the MPS then you are absolutely ready to go again and just tweak your approach. If your blue box is far away from that line then there is more fundamental work needed in shifting your whole strategy onto a higher plain.
I believe in you for next year! I look forward to checking back in here next August to see your pass 
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I note you wrote ’ put in at least 250 hours’…I think this is your main problem. My friend circle who passed Level 3 this year, including me, put in excess of 500 hours easily if not more. We really committed time to learning the material inside out to scrape a pass (myself anyway, others did quite well). I don’t think 250 hours suffices since this level is extrmely qualitative.
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Completely agree with PD, 250 hours are rookie numbers, you got to pump those numbers up man. I did closer to 500 and still looks like I scored on average a 63% for the whole paper.
+1!
Definitely well in the 300hrs - 400hrs for me
. If your blue box is over the MPS then you are absolutely ready to go again and just tweak your approach. If your blue box is far away from that line then there is more fundamental work needed in shifting your whole strategy onto a higher plain.
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This is becoming a pet peeve of mine. The blue box is not what the CFAI says it is, especially at the individual level. I’ll use an example.
Suppose I told you that I wanted to get a confidence interval around an investment index, but I wasn’t going to tell you what that index was. But I’ll give you it’s performance for the past year and it’s +3%. You also have some way to estimate it’s variability and that’s 6%. CFAI tells you that you should then assume the range of expected results for that index over time is -3% to +9%.
If you later learned that that index was the S&P 500, your range would be wildly off. If it was certain bond indicies (moderate to long duration), you’d probably be pretty close.
They’ve taken a single trial (how you did on exam day) and essentially assumed you had a 50th percentile result. It can’t possibly be that all candidates (or even a large %) had a 50th percentile result (of their capabilities) on exam day.
What they are showing you is the likely range of your 50th percentile result. Not your likely range of future results if you take the exam again. They would have failed quantitative methods had I been grading their essay about how to interpret the results.
Tommy: when I was a graduate student in mathematics, I needed one more class one semester. I ended up taking an upper division statistics class against my better judgment (I would have preferred partial differential equations, or differential geometry, or a host of other classes; I _ hate _ statistics).
On my first midterm, I scored 20% (1 question out of 5). I had had a miserable week at work – working 16-hour days all week – and my brain was mush when I took the exam.
However, I ended up passing the class.
Bottom line: you can pass this exam. Don’t let one miserable result define you.
For those of you saying put in minimum certain amount of time I think it is rubbish… its about quality time. I put in 300-400 hrs solid but failed by a skin of my teeth; funny enough I did ok on AM even after leaving one full question blank due to time…PM is what killed me and I am starting to think under stress I fell for every trick as I thought it was a breeze. Last year I did excellent on PM and bombed the morning (leaving 3 full AMs blank)…last year band 6 or 8 can’t recall, this year if there was a band would be band 10 as my score was touching the MPS. I figured my overall score was between 57-62 which based on MPS Makes me believe I failed by matter of 1-2% (2 MC or 1 part mark AM)… so hard to take specially with amount of studying and marks I was going into the exam all in 70s. I was down in the gutter last 30hrs depressed as shit but starting to feel better and realizing I got soooo close and I am sure 50% of the material is fresh in my head so will start again and take a stab at it…will start early and focus on getting through readings by end of this year (CFAI and Schweser again I think) then hit the videos and practice in the New Year… I want to be getting 90%+ on everything going into June 2019 so no exam stress condition or lack of sleep can fuck with me…I will most likely put in over 500+hrs this year but after a decade+ in this program and 2-3 half ass attempts at level 3 and 1 proper attempt and still a fail (not to mention 7 years break in the middle) I owe it to myself to finish it… to motivate myself more I will activate my membership come January instead of wasting money on retab of 2018 results…my feelings have turned form sorrow and pitty to anger as I go through emotions and want to harvest the anger and turn it into learning and be in 90% percentile next year.
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Don’t use Schweser. Just study directly from CFAI. I was getting around 60-70% on the past years AM before the exam.
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Left 0 points blank. It has been said already but this is key, and why you should do timed mocks for a least a month before the exam. Every single mock should be timed except your first one.
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Not sure
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Yes it is worth it. It is just a test and you have already proven you have the knowledge to make it this far. You have already done all the suffering, get a reward out of it!
Yeap my comments are probably relevant for me only and some others. I haven’t put in more than 200 hours for any level yet, so refuse to believe that doubling the effort increases chances of passes… Level 3 material is ~30% less than Levels 1 and 2, so even though it is more qualitative, should require less time to revise. Plus it will be my third attempt, I stand by my comment it can be done in ~250 hours. Learnt my lesson the hard way when tried to do in 70… as that much time should probably be spent on mocks and practice tests alone.
Agree about the xxx hrs required to pass being misleading. It’s about quality. I have had study sessions where I spent 3 hours at one or two LOS and going nowhere b/c it’s econ/gips vs. quality 30 minutes that help me check off 5-7 LOS (like equity). Yes, some LOS are much easier/harder than others, but the point is you have to be honest about whether you’ve grasped the concepts or not.
I made it a habit to always reviewed the LOS (printable on CFAI website) after each book and ask myself if I at least understand. The memorization on formulas or charts can come later, like the steps to calculate interest rate swaps. For each LOS, the goal is to:
READ --> UNDERSTAND --> MEMORIZE --> MASTER… TO A POINT WHERE I CAN WRITE/EXPLAIN THROUGH VARIOUS FORMS OF QUESTIONS
Granted, it would cost xxx hrs to do this for each LOS, but the goal should be to get as much as you can, rather than creating a spreadsheet that says you’ve studied 1,000 hours… if you didn’t learn anything then it’s futile in its worst aspop1 form.
A lot of people say ‘oh I went to the gym today so I’m better off because of it…’ but the question you have to ask yourself is ‘what did I do in the gym today…and how did I do it’
same concept here. I never counted the hours.
I had to figure that out - how close the scores are between 10th and 90th percentile - it’s pretty crazy; don’t get discouraged. I woke up this morning a new person - ready to go!