I have been going through the CFAI provided online practice questions for a week or so (about 15% through them) and either I am still mentally/emotionally scarred from the incredible difficulty of L2, or the questions the CFAI are providing us for L3 are on the easier side. I hope this isn’t coming across as bragging or anything like that - it’s more or less validating. I want to make sure these questions and the overall difficulty are similar to what we’ll be seeing in a few months.
Anyone else feel this way? Any L3 re-takers care to chime in?
Although I haven’t looked at the practice questions yet (done the EoC questions though), I feel the overall difficulty of the material is easier than level II. I planned to finish reading 1 month prior to the exam but I happened to finish it already, it feels kind of weird. The material just makes way more sense to me now than it did for level II. I think it has to do with the topics being tested, e.g. portfolio management is more intuitive to me / easier to grasp than trying to remember all kinds of hypothesis testing or pension accounting rules.
The material seems easier than L2, but I am not so convinced that the online questions are that easy. Some are, but probably you didn’t find the other ones which are not that easy…
Ditto in almost every thing you said. I had a May 25th goal of finishing all the readings and I finished them last week. I feel like I must be missing something…It helps that I am a Portfolio Manager @ a wealth management firm, but that doesn’t explain all of why it seems easier.
I say we all just keep taking the online question and occasionally post on this thread discussing the overall difficulty of the questions. Hopefully, that will give us a better gauge of the difficulty on exam day.
Have a look on the questions about private wealth, I find them to be tricky and everything else than too easy.
I had the same feeling when reading the curriculum, a lot of obvious and easy things (often repeated through the different readings). But then as soon as you start with practicing you’ll find out that there is a lot of subjective interpretation in some topics and how to answer the questions (for example private wealth).
Today, I did derivatives tests and as you mentioned it was not easy. so the conclusion (at least for me) is " even if there are some easy questions there are difficult questions as well". And the only fact is we need to work hard through the exam day.
Are there actually still “Topic Tests” on the CFAI website? I only see the 324 online ‘practice questions’ (and sample AM / PM mock), which I’m assuming have taken the place of the “Topic Tests” as they were referred to last year.
so…2 months later and I finished all 360 questions.
Few observations of my own and comments from others that posted under various questions:
As I went through the questions, I felt they were getting progressively harder with more minutiae.
Additionally, I felt they were getting trickier/wordier - in almost an unfair way. Fixed Income 2 and later Econ questions have a bunch of comments from other candidates pretty echoing this point.
I tried to be honest with myself and my ability, so I didn’t rest any questions. In total, I have a 68% and I’m in the 58% percentile (so some of you either did amazing or you reset your questions)
Lots of folks (myself included) reset questions. I actually use it as a form of studying. For example, I take a practice test and do poorly in Economics…then I will go back and read bits of the chapter that I struggled on, and then I redo all the Economics questions to reinforce it.
