Hi all, I’m new here and this is my very first post. I’ve been lurking a while now (discovered this site through google) and find these forums quite insightful for the most part so I would please like some input. So I’ve made a calculated decision to seek the CFA charter and wrote my exam in Dec. just a few weeks ago. I just want to post about my exam experience and possibly get some advice/reassurance/cold hard e-slap to the face/etc., the reason being some of what I read on these forums give me quite a bit of confidence, and other stuff simply freak me out. I’ve spent the last 4 months (possibly longer) going through all the Schweser notes and going through some of the CFAI text book Multiple Choice EOC questions. The reason I say *some* is because I found the Schweser textbooks EOC questions as well as “Self Test” questions to be more challenging relative to CFA textbook EOCs and, from comments both here and off these forums, seemingly closer to actual CFA exam questions than the CFA textbook EOCs. I timed myself for as much of the Schweser EACs as I could as well as for the Schweser Self Tests (1.5 mins per question). Furthermore I’ve done tons and tons of hours on the timed LOS, Reading and Study Session questions on Schweser’s website (I assume this is what people are referring to when they say QBank). I’ve also done the CFAI mock exam questions but NOT IN AN EXAM SETTING. In otherwords I didn’t do them with a 3 hr time limit for each of the 120 question. I did them section by section but each section I did I would set a time limit for myself of 1.5 per question. So for example, I would give myself 15 mins to complete the CorFi section. On top of that I did the Schweser exams which I believe is a must, some from V1 and some from V2. These I DID DO in an exam. Not so much the full 6 hours but a time limit of 3 hours for every 120 questions that I did. I did 7 of these “120” question sessions… to put it in context, the equivalent of 3.5 full six hour exams. So, now that that’s out of the way, here’s my dilemma: Out of the 7 Schweser exams that I did, my lowest mark was just over 75% (29 wrong; I’m allowed 36 wrong for 84/120 = 70%) and my highest mark was roughly 84% (19 wrong), with the rest hovering between 76% and 78%. I did V1E1AM, V1E1PM, V2E1AM, V2E1PM, V2E3AM, V1E3AM, V1E3PM. On my Self Test questions on Schweser, much of those were just below 70% or significantly below 70%, which I took before the Schweser practice exams, and at the time that was simply a part of the studying process for me as I would review my mistakes on those. The online Schwes questions yielded better results for me (usually above 70%) but I assume that’s because those online questions were probably slightly easier than the Schwes textbooks. The ethics questions on the CFA mock were definitely harder than the Schwes exams an probably slightly harder than the CFA ethics EOC and the Schwes ethics Self Test (stating this is redundant because much of the Schwes ethics Self Test questions were pulled directly from the CFA ethics EOC). I got above 70% on these EOCs and the online questions, but I definitely did NOT get above 70% on the CFA mocks… in fact I recall that I failed one the first time around. As for on the ethics portion on the Schwes practice exams my lowest mark was 9 wrong (50%) and my highest was 3 wrong (83.33%)–(interestingly enough the exam where I got the 9 wrong wasn’t the exam where I scored my lowest mark of just above 75% overall). Of the 7 Schwes practice exams I took, only two (including the one I just identified above) were ones where I got below 70% (the other one being 6 wrong out of 18). The rest hovered between 3 wrong and 5 wrong (72%). So my 2 question are this: 1) rather than the full 6 hrs for 240 questions with 2 hour break in between, by doing 3 hrs for 120 questions is still following exam day stress testing is it not? The reasoning behind this being if I think of the exam not as one big 6 hr exam but rather two 3 hr exams set 2 hours apart. Keep in mind when I was doing the practice exams, with the exception of the very last (7th) exam, the others I wrote two at a time a day… maybe not 2 hrs apart, more like 3 hrs apart, but still two a day & time for grading and studying mistakes. 2) and this is the more important question: I keep seeing people post about how Schwes’s practice exam ethics section are a joke. This has me nervous and psyched out. When I wrote the actual exam I felt that the AM exam was overall much easier than the PM but I felt that the AM Ethics was harder than the PM. I felt that the PM was more on par with the Schwes practice exams and so more straightforward. Can anyone else confirm feeling this way as well? How did you find the Schwes practice exam ethics section compared to the actual exams? I felt that the CFA PM ethics section seemed less tricky than AM and seemed on par with the Schwes practice exam questions, but I’m worried (post exam jitters maybe?) that I may have been lulled into a false sense of security in the PM one. At what lengths will CFA go to to trip me up on Ethics? And then, if that’s the case, working through the ethics section of the Schwes practice exams; did this lull me into a false sense of security about the actual AM Ethics portion? The reason being I assumed that the Schwes difficulty level on the Ethics would match that of the exam… and for the non ethics related sections Schwes truly did… in fact much of the Schwes non ethics practice questions may have even been harder than the actual exam. So the question is did YOU find Schwes practice exam ethics sections to be on par with CFA actual, and if not, how bad is the handicap? I’ve worked in some worst case scenarios (ok not worst case but really bad case scenarios) where in the AM I get 10 wrong out of 18 and in the afternoon I get 7 wrong and I JUST make it into the 36 wrong limit (84/120) in each case. I’m possibly confident that I won’t get as many as 7 wrong in PM and somewhat confident that it won’t be as bad as 10 wrong in the AM (because that’s just shameful). Thank you in advance.
I realise the above was a long winded post, I’m merely asking: How would you compare the disparity between the Schweser ethics questions in the practice exams Volume 1 and 2 against the CFI mock exams against the Dec. 4th CFA exam?
Let it slide man. You’ll know soon enough.
amalj Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Let it slide man. You’ll know soon enough. This isn’t about me, I just wanna know how other Schweser users felt about the exam’s ethics section v.s. the Schweser mocks’ ethics sections.
Here is how I studied for ethics and I felt really prepared when answering the questions on both the AM & PM sessions of the Exam. I read the Code and Standards Book published by the CFA Institute over a couple days before the exam. Available free straight from their website. Schweser was a good warm-up but their Ethics questions are formatted nothing like CFAI’s. It is listed as a responsibility of a candidate to read the Code & Standards and only makes sense that they would test directly from their own material. As I went through the exam I felt “familiar” with the exam questions if that makes sense.
memibanker Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Here is how I studied for ethics and I felt really > prepared when answering the questions on both the > AM & PM sessions of the Exam. > > I read the Code and Standards Book published by > the CFA Institute over a couple days before the > exam. Available free straight from their website. > Schweser was a good warm-up but their Ethics > questions are formatted nothing like CFAI’s. It is > listed as a responsibility of a candidate to read > the Code & Standards and only makes sense that > they would test directly from their own material. > As I went through the exam I felt “familiar” with > the exam questions if that makes sense. True, and this does make sense to me. I read through the C&S earlier on in my study process as well as the Schweser notes. I noticed that many of the Schweser examples in the study notes as well as the Self Test questions were taken straight out of the C&S, verbatim. The Schweser mocks’ ethics formatting was probably a little off when compared to the CFAI mock. I just hope the Schweser mocks’ ethics’ difficulty level is at least somewhat comparable to the actual exam.