Ambiguity of Questions

I have to say that for the first time since starting the program last weeks test was the first time I didn’t recall seeing at least one question that I felt was ambiguous enough to feel compelled to drop a comment to CFAI, was just curious if anyone else felt the same way.

+1

Actually just one for sure in the whole exam… sadly cannot say which… FOF

if you took the N.America AM I felt there was at least one that was pretty werid.

In our PM I didn’t think there were really any though.

Of course it could also be because the AM session is mostly a blur to me. I sat for it in N. America FYI.

It isn’t that none were ambiguous but there were a few obscure, non core items which don’t make the person passing a better analyst. But I guess if we were to design a test for that it would not be this.

Only one small information in the AM

If you would agree with most that the CFAI curriculum is very broad and not particularly complex or have focused depth in any one direction, I would recommend learning all of the curriculum. I’m not sure what you’re angle is with the continued bashing of obscure items, but wouldn’t it seem smart to learn all of the curriculum and not just focus on a certain core? It is there for a reason after all. In addition, I don’t think the intention of passing L3 is to directly measure one’s effectiveness as an “analyst”.

not bashing. But would want to be sure analysts know how to calc certain items

I think this year had the least amount of ambiguity or people really going ‘wtf’ was that in more recent years (at least post-AIMR days). Most other years, AM, during lunch, you had people just exhausted and confused talking to each other about it.

Also, after every exam in previous years, you had people scrambing to this board debating questions. While of course now they’ve done a much better job at staying quiet, that urge to talk about ambiguous questions is alot less thisyear than previous years.

I do know that CFAI were taking feedback last year after the exam, which I hadn’t heard about in previous years, so they might have taken some of it into account. (a co-worker of fine did a survey and explictly expressed her opinion on the ambiguity of questions asked on the test vs what is laid out in the cirriculum/LOS)

All I know is we walked out of that exam wondering WTF had just happened.

All of us were in agreement that the AM we took had alot of what we felt was “non-core” material and the AM had asked questions in a manner we had never seen before for some of the questions.

+1.