CFAilure: when you note that you totally whiffed on 2 questions, might these be questions that had the most points? That could be a killer right there.
Take Level UP course next year and at least get yourself in the game, because LevelUp does grind your nose hard into those AM questions that were were downfall.
Dear Successful Candidates, future successful candidates, CFA Charterholders, throlls and employees of PR dept of CFAI,
I will be truly supprise if you will give me any part of my posting today where I:
Whine
Blame CFAI of my failure on the exam
Claim that I am the one who must pass
Claim that CFA Exam is supposed to be easy - at least that for me to pass it.
It is not there. Excuse me. Are you reading from unwritten?
Anyway, I would like to put some things in order.
Yes, I failed 6 times on Level 2. It’s easy to fail if you cannot put more than, roughly speaking 150 hours for a round. Was that my fault? It was. Do I blame the CFAI for that? I do not. Why did I continue coming to the Exam? I am not going to discuss that right now. Did I ask some advice on AF? I did and people (Itera was the first) advised me to give up immidiately. Next year I passed. Why did I pass? Was able to put a lot more time. That is all.
So why I am here?
I think that if CFAI ‘preaches’ about transparency it must (to my opinion) be the flagman of it all.
Do you mean that the L3 must be rough and tough? Fine. Do you think it must be a full time study program? Great. But please - did that disclosure. Tell it beforehand.
You think a candidate must understand a special intention of the question? Great!! For me - even tourch him with electricity. But - please, give the disclosure. Let him know from his mistakes. Scan his answer book with the grader’s comments / mark and make it online right after the testday.
‘Deaf years’ of CFAI? Great. If CFAI did not want to execute some ethical behaviour to its candidates, let’s know about that. Nobody’s whining. Just follow your own standards, CFAI. Disclosure (an by the way 2500 pages in a semester is a full time study programm and I guess it must be disclosed to potential working candidates), accountability on treaky question wording (so we can learn etc) and so on.
I am not writing for myself - let’s say, I’m done. I would like to help other people who would be stacked on a certain level for years. Why? Since my Dad once told me: if the right thing is not done by other people, do it yourself.
LOL. Shocker!
I guess some can do it with 2 hours of preparation time - so what? There is CBOK and Curriculum. There is a certain number of pages in the curriculum books. Can you pass without reading it?
Background? Well, if you will give me one who’s using more than 35% on the curriculum… investment consultant is far from dealing room and dealer could be at home on derivatives but have no connection to macro or pm… background… background… everyone needs to study for the exam. people who claim that did it after xxx hours of study - did they clock their study time? oh yeah…
The 300 hours is just a mean they obtained from surveying candidates which can have a skewed distribution. Putting in the recommended time does not guarantee a pass I think anyone understands that. Just like not everyone can get 99th percentile on the GMAT no matter how much time they put in. There are people who are horrible at test taking but excel at other things in the real world. Maybe the exam is not for you but since you already passed L2 I don’t see a reason why you can’t pass L3.
And it does not really take that much time like a full-time program if you start early, You are telling me you don’t have extra 1-2 hrs a day reading and take some time off the week before the exam to practice? I’ve done all three exams while working full-time or full-time graduate program. It’s not that demanding.
I was eager to hear your opinion. Thank you. 
You’re posting in a public forum. It’s implied you’re asking for people’s opinions.
On the matter at hand, I don’t see how you can question the integrity of the exam because they ‘don’t give a guideline for study hours.’ By now, and given your history, you should know the exams are hard and different candidates require differing amounts of study time. CFAI correctly says that ‘many students require over 300 hours to study for the exam.’ There’s nothing more they can do. They’ve disclosed all that they require. You know going into it that the curriculum is ~2500 pages and it will take a lot of your spare time. If you didn’t know, that’s your own fault by not looking into it beforehand.
You’re also asking them to scan your entire exam, create a pdf from it, and send it to you with remarks from the grader. That takes time and money. Money that would increase your exam fees. If you’re willing to pay for that, fine. Not a lot of us are.
As one commenter said, CFAI does make errors (it’s blatantly apparent given the what happened on Jul28). So, if you’re certain you did enough to pass, ask for a retab and you will get a second look at your paper.
It just came to my mind that by its preaching for values and not given any disclosers for candidates CFAI resembles me a religiouse leader who preaches against violence and porno in the bookmarks of his own browser… just a metaphor…
I am looking into your comment. Your opinion is really important to me. I asked you for that. Thank you.
…or I just copied here a letter I send to CFAI and did not ask for advises or opiniones? Who knows…
So have you heard anything back from Paul Smith?
This is nothing but whining and entitlement. Why don’t you just take some self responsibility? The L3 exam this year was very fair and very passable.
You know going into L3 that it is the hardest exam; only half the people intelligent and dedicated enough to pass L2, pass L3. This is very different from the other levels, where anyone can sit for L1, and anyone with some dedication can pass L1 and sit L2. There is a lot of cannon fodder in the fail numbers for L1 and L2, but vast majority L3 fails are very competent, dedicated, intelligent people.
So instead of whining, why don’t you assess your performance, find out where you can improve, change your study plan to allow for those improvements to happen, and sit and try again next year?
Failing sucks, I get it, I had to do L2 twice. But focus on yourself, and find a way to improve.
If you wanted no opinions or comments, get a spiral notebook, write your own “dear diary” entries in there, and keep it under your bed.
If you post something on AF, you’re going to get comments/opinions.
and after failing L2 6x I still stand by my original comments. you would do better spending your time elsewhere
After reading your posts here, I think your problem may be in properly conveying your point. It’s pretty hard to follow what you’re writing at times, and that may have played into your struggles with the AM essay answers.
You are getting upset at what others are comprehending from your first post (whining, blaming CFAI, etc). That is what they are getting out of YOUR WRITING. Maybe it’s not what you intended to convey, but it is what is being understood.
This may have been a problem on your essay responses. You might have tried to say something that the grader interpreted differently.
I would recommend doing mock exam AM sessions and sharing your answers with a few people who can grade them for you. This might help make sure that the points you are trying to convey in your answers are being understood by others.
I can’t imagine how hard these exams must be for non-native English speakers. Level II had a lot of reading and I can’t imagine it’s easy to write clear essay responses for Level III. I lived in Costa Rica for 2 years and speak pretty good spanish, but it’s MUCH easier for me to read something or listen to someone than me writing or speaking.
Good luck if you continue with Level III. After seeing your persistence with Level II I can’t imagine you will give up.
Your opinion is of highest degree of value. Thank it. I’ve been looking into it. And… and… I love you, Itera 
You’ll get transparency when the 2015 AM portion is released in December and you see how you really didn’t know half as much as you thought you did.
I failed L3 last year and had a couple rough days after receiving the result, but I never expected this journey to be easy and I pulled myself up to quit making excuses and just get back in the books to retake the exam. I hope you look back in a couple weeks at this letter and regret how you handled the failure.
CFAilure, why are you pursuing the credentials while you might have better competencies? Your perseverance, and audacity are the core characteristics of entrepreneurs. Why don’t you start your own business, struggle, rise, struggle, rise higher, and become insanely rich and successful. Am not kidding, you might have it in you .
The CFAI may preach transperancy but I think it more in the form of publically traded companies corporate responsibilities as opposed to a test grading/marking system. The CFAI is under no obligation to give people back their marks and show how they were marked. If you read online and read on the CFAI website or in the materials they provide or in the prep they provide I think it’s fairly apparent that you should know what you have to do to pass. Who cares about transparency on a test, we have provincial tests here in grade school, no one gets to see their test after ever and I don’t see anyone that’s taken the government to task on this simply because it is not important.
My advice is to know the material well enough, so your know the answers well enough on the test equals pass
Maybe you are right. But I never cried here ‘poor poor me’. I just think that if it takes on average 600 hours to read the curriculum, cfai is to tell me ‘quit your job, sit and study for 5 month’ before I come and see the quantity of studying to be done.
And again, maybe I made mistakes, but let me learn from 'em… otherwise it looks like a religiouse sect, not study program
Again, it would not make a difference if it were 300 or 600 hours. Manage your time/schedule and you’ll be fine.
Regarding CFA curriculum length, every candidate has to cover the same curriculum, so there is no unfairness on that end. There is always the Schweser books if CFAI books are too long for you. Granted that requires extra financial resources, but if you’re really that cash strapped where you cannot afford Schweser, I don’t think registering for an exam that could take multiple attempts and multiple registration fees really is the best use of money.
Regarding number of hours, the 300 hours is clearly an estimated mean of all candidates. By the time you sit for CFA exams, you’ve sat through standardized exams in grade school, secondary school, and college. From those experiences you have an idea of where you are relative to your peers and how long it takes you to study to achieve certain results. The CFA is not all that much different than the SAT or the GMAT, not everyone can score 99th percentile, except in this case you need to score above a certain percentile to pass. Barely passing isn’t enough. There are also different studying strategies. For me I skip studying on days where I feel tired or distracted. I measure my studying in terms of effective study hours. Hours where I have my books and my texts in front of me or where I’m nodding off are not effective study hours. I can say in total I spent less than 170 hours for CFA Level I and less than 250 hours on CFA Level II, both while studying full-time or working full-time, and probably only 75% of that time was “effective.” The reason I call it effective is that studying is simply progressing in understanding: read, solve problems, review, re-test, review, re-test. The CFA curriculum does not typically have enough depth where I cannot understand the material from simply progressing using that study strategy. In no instance where I follow that path do I not feel like I end up mastering the material, or at least understanding enough to squeak a 4/6 on a vignette. The variable time is the review. Reading is pretty fixed if it’s effective, as does solving problems. If it takes you extra time to understand the concepts, then that’s what it takes. The CFA is not theoretical math or physics, which are subjects I could spend hours thinking and not progressing much in my understanding.
I suggest you analyze your study strategy as 7 attempts on L2 indicates there is obviously something wrong there. It could simply be a matter of not-enough-time and/or effort, in which case you’re best off inferring the same happened for L3. Nobody is selecting you out for failure 6 times.
Regarding exam disclosure, the CFA is unique in that it is offered only once a year and the exam is difficult to design. I would like very much to see solutions for LI and LII, but I do not think personal results for LIII essats should be released – this is simply a logistical nightmare.