Oh I truly have no idea. Some people have elaborate systems that they use to grade themselves during the exam, I’ve always found that odd too. I just personally wanted to throw some positive energy into the universe rather than sit here thinking I failed for 10 weeks. How productive can that be?
I thoguht the exam was okay, but i left one entire question blank in the AM session. does thsi mean anything? because wouldnt this mean that my MPS would begin at 95%?
Pass rates were below 50% for various years…
I felt decent about AM and great about PM. Was it the quantitative aspects or conceptual aspects that people found difficult in the PM?
Similar to you. Felt good about AM, slightly better about PM. So, Yes.
There were several sub-questions on the AM itemsets that left me scratching. And a big subquestion that carried weight I got wrong, even though I skip them in the mocks because of how it easy it is to save time. I forgot to add one variable in the formula for some reason. Which likely won’t even give me partial credit.
Ethics in the PM section was totally brutal. I was left guessing 80% of them. Probably <50% on that. The rest was fine except for 3-4 questions that I had to get back to. Made some mistakes that I now know of upon revision.
Expecting band 9-10 or pass. I’m clearly somewhere on the border.
Yes.
If you get band 9 the world is a dark and cruel place. You were an important voice in the level 2 forums from what I remember. Haven’t used analystforum much for level 3, but also saw you here as well. Agree that ethics was brutal and that it could really go either way. Thinking about them and looking at the standards afterwards still has me wondering.
Agree with the AM. Some sub-questions were truly truly weird. I kept trying to circle back and ask myself “what are they trying to test?” and I was drawing a blank. Nice shot of anxiety throughout haha. Did you finish with time to spare? I finished with like 5 minutes left on the AM, without any real time to make any meaningful changes to my previous answers.
Conceptual aspects were more difficult/less clear cut than quantitative aspects in the PM for me.
felt am was easier than all the mock exams. Finished with 45min or so left, was able to go back and check answers….found one I had simply mislabeled after doing my math right hah. There were a few tricks that I wasn’t positive I did correctly but even with that there weren’t any concepts I didn’t know. The tricks were all on questions with low point values or ones where you can easily get partial credit, so they aren’t too punishing. PM was harder than all the mocks I did. I was getting 85-95% on multiple choice mocks, but I highly doubt I did that we’ll on the exam due to a number of 50/50 questions. I feel people always overreact to tricks. We all take the same exam, we all had a hard time on those tricks. Missing a few tricks is fine, as long as you did well on the rest you should be good. 30% of the exam wasn’t tricks, so getting 70% is doable. Lots of no shows… I don’t think they count against the curve sadly. Wish they showed instead!
Yes - I feel like I passed.
I’ve finished AM 15 minutes ahead of time, with only two subquestions missing, one in equity where you had to circle a choice of three, and I don’t remember the second one (think it was behavioural). Got them wrong by guessing.
Finished PM with 1.5 hours to spare. Sadly had to revise one question where it was initially correct 
. Besides ethics, I’d like to think I did fairly well on the rest >75%. Only thing stopping me from passing is the AM grading scheme and ethics. I tend to be overly subtle in responses simply writing out keyword like “Long time horizon, young age, can get out of retirement, high risk tolerance”, without putting it into real words. Hope it doesn’t come back to bite me.
Same experience on PM for me.
From my point of view, AM was “easy” (but still required a good time management) but maybe i missed some information or some traps.
Man, don’t know how anyone could finish AM with 45 mins to spare. I usually BLAZE through tests, have never had a time problem in my entire life I don’t think, but I was pressed on the AM here on Level 3 (first time taker).
Band 10 retaker here: I thought AM and PM were easier than 2015. Could just be because I had another year of studying. Thought I completely bombed it last year and still got Band 10. Feel much better about it this year so I’m expecting a pass…but who knows.
I didn’t study many hours this year but still remembered most everything from last year so it was basically just a review. Should be a pass but I guess we’ll just see.
I love ranting about Ethics so I think I’ll do it again. So right are you about the 10-80% range, I think we all feel that way. The Ethics questions are SUBJECTIVE. There is not enough information given to make a definitive answer on most of them. Based on unstated assumptions, you could make an argument for more than one answer on nearly every Ethics question.
Ethics, particularly on L3, is an absolute joke and is nothing more than a tool used to lower scores. Ethics, as it is tested upon in L3 is unethical.
While I’m ranting, I also think it’s funny that CFA says that questions ARE NOT designed to trick you. But 95% of all questions have a twist to them designed to trick you into picking one of the decoy answers. I don’t mind the exam being tricky…but they could at least be honest about their intentions.
Why would you base an answer on unstated assumptions?
Maybe I’ll get destroyed on Ethics this time, it’s my first attempt at Level 3. But I have written 4 CFA exams prior to this and have been over 70% in ethics every single one. Even my worst fail, Band 3 on Level 2, I was over 70% on ethics.
The one question about the xxxx was completely unfair. I had to go back to the book following the exam to figure it out, and it was literally one word that made the answer right or wrong. I can’t believe how deep it was.
That question wasnt fair… i think
I probably had over 450 hours of study time. If I get the results back and don’t pass, I will be very upset for “wasting” the last nine months. After a few days of self-loathing and drinking, I will pull myself back together, log back on to AF, and start deciding which prep provider to use for L3 2017.