First, thanks for all the great people particpating on this board. It is really helping me prepare for the test. I often miss important key words in a practice question that results in a “right” answer but not a right answer to the question asked. I assume that although I skim questions now or start figuring out my answer before I read the whole question, on exam day I will be able to focus because it is the real thing. Were you guys able to pick details pretty easily and hopefully prevent easy mistakes? Any suggestions/comments are helpful.
I am sure I missed quite a few of those by misreading something or falling in a trap. I took a bunch of practice exams from Schweser, CFAI online, and BSAS. Those seemed to help me identify some of the trap questions. No way you can catch them all though.
It’s all about pace. If you have time to do a fair amount of practice exams (within the 3 hour time frame); you’ll be able to fly through the longer quant based questions giving yourself more time to read in to questions that could “trap” you. Ie conceptual questions - factor increases how does it affect two different ratios (there were a few question that asked if this increases, does this ratio increase and does this second ratio decrease - these can get your mind twisted up; draw it out) Also ethics… Essentially wordy questions can cause you to rush your answer under the time constraint. I found that after being able to finish a schweser exam within the 3 hr time frame, time wasn’t nearly as much of a problem on the real thing.
i know i made two. i did so many questions i thought i knew what the question was asking before i read it. i actually went back and found a few that i had erroneously read, but who knows?
try to remember something cold instead of trying them to figure them on exam such as for discount bonds CFO is overstated…
actually i find it easier to understand the concept rather than memorizing something cold…theres way too many lower higher, understated, overstated, increase decrease to try to remember anything with out actually understanding why it is that way. Once you understand why…you dont need to memorize as much.
I think I fell for a lot of traps… from the lack of sleep, and the trying to get the test over syndrome… I barely had time to finish in the morning session… The afternoon was slightly better, but I was very tired and at one point just sort of wanted to go for the first instinct and not even think…
I tried to circle the key words in the exam book as I went through the question (“least likely” or “is not a violation” etc.)…that helped me slow down a bit and identify what they are specifically looking for. I know one candidate on this board read the answers first which I thought was interesting too.
I would scan down to the last sentence of most of the long questions to find out what they were asking for before I started reading the actual detail. That seemed to help.
I did the same thing budfox.
I think the biggest trap that many exam takers face is actually choosing between two answers. My strategy was to re-read every question and make sure that the choice that I picked answered exactly the question that was asked. Too many answer choices on the exam sounded right, but did not actually answer the question.
Thanks for the great information. I will review this post before I head into the exam in June. Good luck in your future studies and I look forward to hearing about your [hopefully] positive test results in 6 - 8 weeks.