Just went through the 2012 results thread and some guy passed with 7/9 below 50% in AM!! but he killed PM
http://www.analystforum.com/forums/cfa-forums/cfa-level-iii-forum/91313614?page=7
So true, i did too. No amount of preparation for Ethics is enough…
Now I’m worried about the number that think PM was difficult. Had 90mins on the clock when I finished PM and must have slept for about 20mins.
Yes Yes Yes Yes I think I passed.
L3 Ethics is Unethical it’s so ridiculous. There’s no point in wracking your brain with practice questions as the questions are largely based on ONE SENTENCE of text which you may or may not remember.
Performing well on L3 Ethics requires getting lucky guessing, plain and simple. I say it often, in my opinion, it’s sole purpose is to keep the pass ratio down…not to truly create ethical money managers.
I said this last year with L2. It seems the CFA spends more time in the gray areas of ethics more than other sections. Hopefully I’m done with it, but I’d say if you’re intentionally creating scenarios to make the material more difficult than it really is maybe you’re overtesting. Maybe Ethics on L2 or L3 should be curtailed.
Won’t advise use of erasable inks or pencils for the AM. If you make an error, cross it over and keep writing. You lose important Mins(Points) erasing.
I think there’s something to be said for have a well organized, easily legible AM book. Crossed out answers are more likely to confuse or potentially anger the grader. Erasing does take longer, but is most likely worth it in my opinion.
Further, as I recall, the CFAI instructs candidates to use erasable ink or pencil in the AM. So they appear to have a bias towards erasing vs crossing out.
That whole post just screams unprofessional.
Put in easily over 400 hours, started in November. Pretty sure I failed, though. I wrote 6 mocks total and passed all of them, even with super conservative marking. I scored consistently over 75% on PM’s, and consistently over 65% on AM’s. I thought 2015’s AM was a joke, btw.
All that said, I failed this one. I thought AM was super difficult. I left nothing blank but had to throw a dart at about ~20min worth. I’m sure I also made a heap of calculation mistakes. PM I finished with about 90minutes remaining, as I did with every mock I took. I never felt good about the PM’s (always unsure of my answer for some reason) but always scored over 75%. Not sure how to feel about PM once again.
I’d bet on a pass with this info… remember that MPS is likely in the low 60s… It was hard for everyone and its likely you got a higher score than half the group
I feel like I got a pretty good idea of what it takes to pass after having done 6 mocks, and I really feel like the real thing was the worst one out of all the exams I wrote. Unfortunate, but true. I am betting on about 60/40 pass/fail, personally. Not giving myself better odds - told everyone I know who asked that I failed.
PM was extremely difficult.
With your mock scores and your study time, I think the odds remain in your favor. We tend to magnify areas we didn’t do well in. In your case, you were iffy for about 20min, out of 180, so about 11% of the AM. Many people left like 25% of AM completely blank. Relax…
Always easier to assume failure and set your expectations low so if you pass it’s a nice “surprise” and if you fail you can say I told you so.
Very true, especially at the margin. If I felt better about it I wouldn’t go with this tactic but at this point I feel I’m on the edge and prefer to assume I failed.
^Now the self-fulfilling prophecy will come true.
#CongratsBand10
Let’s hope. I think the thickness of the booklet pages helped.
All I can say is that the exam results are very unpredictable. I was so confident that I did well on the AM part last year, but it turned out to be a huge failure, despite scoring really well on the PM part I got a band 6.
As many others I got stuck on the first AM question and had to catch up, but fortunatelly the questions at the end of the session were not as hard and i was able to finish everything except for skipping one 3 point question.
I think the PM part had 20% easy questions, 30% difficult ones and 50% medium difficatly. I had to guess answers for 8-9 questions, which is more than I expected.
Unless you used some inhuman amount of elbow grease I highly doubt that could happen. I was erasing like a madman throughout the exam (great sign!) and was flipping through pages a lot… never came across a situation where I erased something on a back page. As Mace said I even did a quality check before the exam ended to ensure I answered all questions and again no sign of unintentional erasing.
For further peace of mind: I just tested out my eraseable pen that I used during the exam (Pilot Frixion Blue) on a very thin piece of notebook paper, tried erasing the back, and the ink held up fine while still fresh.
I used the same pen as you did. I also tested this on the next day after the exam and the writing on the back of the page got partially erased. I guess it all depends on the amout of the heat the friction produces.