The exam was extremely, extremely fair. The majority of candidates actually passed it.
Judging from your letter, you do not have strong writing skills, and you did not manage your time well during the exam. Those two things will lead to a very bad morning session score, and most likely a failing grade.
Also, in terms of your CFAI hour disclosure rant, I totally disagree. I studied less than 300 hours for all three levels. Different people use their study time differently than others, and some people are just more efficient or have developed better techniques. If you spent 1,000 hours reading the primary text and did not take one practice exam you would fail.
A candidate advisory support line? Besides this forum and the wealth of information about the program on CFAI’s website and the Internet in general, I think you should have your bases covered. This is getting ludicrous!
My letter is no ‘rant’ and has nothing to do with my personal fate. 1. I would like to discuss the transparency for the grading process: cfai could make the guidlines public right after the exam for us to evaluate our perfomance. 2. To my humble opinion cfai should give more valid asession of the time needed to pass every level - for instance, by calculation the average of ours reported by those who passed and failed. 3. The cfai could just scan the answer sheet of am session after the grading process is over so we could learn from our mistakes. Where do you find any ‘rant’, Sir?
The characteristics of the “everyone’s a winner” and “entitled” generation are proudly being displayed by a few throughout this thread… By all means, fly to Charlottesville and protest outside CFAI’s office with signs and loudspeakers. Grab a couple minions and march up and down the street, have a day of civil disobedience, and call it good.
Besides, different people learn differently, at different paces. This is not a one-size-fits-all kind of deal. Also, people have a tendency to lie or exaggerate… what’s to say people didn’t exaggerate the number of hours they studied??? you already know that, on average, people reportedly need about 300 hours to prepare for these exams… some more, some less… regardless, you need to study until you fully understand the testable material… period… end of story. Besides, I doubt the vast majority of test takers truly keep track of actual, productive hours studying… moral of my story… study until you know the material… then study some more.
This will be made available in December… be patient, Grasshopper.
On December the guidline answers for AM 2015 will be made public. The general guidlnes but not the answers given by a specific Candidate.
On this stage - and that is my letter all about - I do not know what happened to my AM. A do nt know the score. I do not remeber my answers. Publishing AM answers 6 month after the exam has nothing to do with transparency, imo.
Maybe, I dunno, get a better grasp of the material and learn how to answer the questions correctly and in the format the CFAI wants. Might be better use of your time than chasing windmills.
Maybe, just maybe, my letter to Paul Smith will read another 1,000 of people who will think if it worth to enroll the CFA Exam. Maybe, just maybe, after that CFAI Board will gather and decide to became not an easy exam, no, but to give to the potential Candidates more information before the Exam, transparency, you know.
That will not help be but it will help to many-many-many people.
And instead of being emprior you choose to be looged in here 24/7 throlling AFers for the last 10 years I read the forum… Good career, I hope you solicited a rise
Why should the CFAI give guidelines on how much time you need to study? They give you six books and tell you that everything you need to know is in those books. Study them as much or as little as you need to. As someone else pointed out, some of the more intelligent candidates don’t even need to study 300 hrs while others may need 500. It’s not the CFAIs job to tell you how much to study.
As for the exam being ‘fair’. I truly believe Ethics is not fair which I’ve stated on this forum about a hundred times. Every question (ethics or otherwise) usually has a twist to it which is contradictory to the CFAIs claim that they don’t attempt to trick candidates.
Nevertheless, the exams have to be very difficult or the Charter would be meaningless. Lots of the smartest young finance guys in the world study their a**es off for this thing. If the exam were ‘fair’, you’d see 90% pass rates…then, the Charter wouldn’t mean a thing. So, is the exam really ‘fair’? I would say ‘not really’, but it’s gotta be tough and making it ‘fair’ would lead to a downgrade of the Charter. So, even as a Band 10 loser who admittedly was overconfident, I’m completely fine with the CFAI and their exams (except for Ethics of course!).
In terms of transparency, you must first take a step back and ask yourself what exactly the CFA is and why exactly you are pursuing it. Hopefully, you will come to the realization that the CFA is simply a designation designed to distinguish yourself from others and provide you with credibility in the professional workplace. Like any club, its exclusivity makes it appealing, attractive and respected. If you wish to gain acceptance into this prestigious organization, you must trust and confide in their ways. If you do not like these realities, I suggest you stop pursuing the CFA. I do not know of any legal jurisdiction that requires investment professionals to have the CFA by law. It is merely a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have.
In terms of study hours, you should consider the difference between “what” and “how”. You are focused too much on the what (i.e. 300 hours), and not enough on the how (i.e. practice exams instead of primary text). The CFA does not provide overly detailed instructions on how to succeed because it wants to filter for people who are capable of determining a path to success on their own (and, quite frankly, there is already an abundance of this type of information publicly available through Kaplan and even Analyst Forum).
CFAI should not give any guidlines, but merely to disclose the amount of work to be done before you are in the process. You are right, the Curriculum can be stidied for 200, 600 or 1200 hours but if a potential candidate should know that Level 2 exam takes on average XXX hours so she would consider if she can afford it (for instance, by taking a leave from her office). any vouge definition of ‘lt of time’ or ‘more than 300 hours’ are merely misleading and should be provided by a more valid estimate / benchmark of a time average successful candidate invested.
