Did anyone take the exam? morning session was wierd, lot of memorization required, afternoon was easier(not that I scored 90%). I finished in two hours. On the whole, lot easier compared to real exam situations. I must have scored around 65%. 41/60 in the afternoon session. any comments on the exam??
krishna I had the bsas exam emailed to me. I havent looked at the afternoon…and i looked thru some of the questions for the AM session. The AM session freaked me out because I was looking at the questions thinking…these r just like randomly pulled LOSs…you either know them or you dont. and they are hard to explain in essay/written format. It kinda lit a fire under my a$$
Krishna, I took the BSAS mock and wasn’t all that impressed. We scored roughly the same it seems like and I too finished with plenty of extra time. There were a couple of very simple questions in the afternoon and I doubt questions that easy will show up on the real exam (for example, the one about socially responsible investing). Another thing that frustrated me is that one question in derivatives was asked twice. The same EXACT question asked twice. Did you notice that? Also, there were plenty of typos but nothing major enough to not get the gist of the question. The answer key frustrated me a bit more. I’m having trouble understanding why the answer to the DD question in FI was divided by 2. Maybe I missed something in the readings, but I don’t remember it being done that way.
Dollar duration - am not sure about that too. I went back to the CFA example. It looks like they are giving equal weightate(not sure why). atleast the CFA example states that the PV of all the three are equal and hence giving 0.33 weightage. here the PV is 7Mn and 3Mn and am not sure why it is being weighted equally. also I thought you would weigh using MV. I too got $360K plus DD wherein the answer states that it is half of that. REgarding the question that was asked twice, I think it is just typo. they meant to ask something using the table on options as is clear from the answer sheet. lots of easy questions… yet I did not score in the 75-80% range to take any comfort out of this.
There is an errata on it already, Q25 afternoon; they didn’t give the right answer in any of their choices (which should be -27 or sell 27 futures). In their answer they give the right formula but do the math wrong to get -40 somehow (the only way to get -40, if maybe somebody who was writing the question confused 9 with 6 for duration of the cheapest to deliver bond and used 6 in the denominator for the formula). Anyway, I spoke to the instructor during the test, and he aknowledged the mistake.
yes you are right. I too got 27. (8-10)/9* 100*1.2
I got -27 too, so this is correct? That gives me 43/60, or I guess 43/59 due to that stupid Derivs question showing up twice. I am disappointed in BSAS for this, there was also an error in the Econ section, and typos abound (they referred to margin on a futures question as market, obviously was able to figure that out though), for a problem to show up verbaitum means virtually nobody proofed it before being finalized, or if they did proof it did so very poorly. Had I paid for this I would be upset, but I didn’t, so I guess I can’t complain too much