I got less than 50% in Ethics when passing level 2. I found the questions in the actual exam to be very subjective and lacking in the detail required to answer the question with confidence - having to answer based on “well that would be true IF” etc. During my practice exams my scores in ethics aren’t exactly filling me with confidence, usually 3-4/6 per item set. I heard somewhere that in Level 3, if you get less than 50% on ethics you fail the exam regardless of your overall score. Is there any thruth in that? Certainly not a topic I’m overlooking either way, as well as behavioural finance. I think I’ll need to score well in both those areas to have a chance of passing.
No, but you drastically reduce your chances.
Honestly, I think Ethics is one of the straightforward topics. I was terrible at them in L1, got a lot better in L2, now I didn’t even review the material a year later and doing quite well in the EOCs. Just remember that the integrity of the market always comes first, then the client next, then the employer, then you. That’s 80% of the material right there. Put on the halo and always seek the best interests in that order.
Thanks, I did the CFAI mocks today where both AM and PM were PM style exams. Scored 70% for AM and 73% for PM, happy with that but my two lowest scores were 6/12 for Ethics and 3/6 for Behavioural Finance - definitely need to brush up here as these should be the relatively easier marks to pick up on the exam!!!
My strategy is to essentially memorize about 1000 Ethics multiple choice questions
Schweser Q bank… 540 Ethics questions… (300 of these are incredibly easy)… I went through all of them untill I narrowed it down to about 50 that are “tough”…
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all EOCs questions
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all schweser questions in “notes”
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all Ethics item set questions in Schweser Practice Exams (did these seperately from the full exam
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8 Ethics item sets CFAI online (pplus the ones in the 2 mocks) - best level of difficulty overall, you can tell these are the real deal
at this point… i kind of see where the ah-ha traps are but the tough ones always come down to a judgement betwee 1/2 choices and i still find questions that will stump me…
what i have found is that 50% of the questions i get wrong are because i was careless in the reading and overlooked a detail (i know the concept/answer, but did not read the entire vignette properly) or i confused least likely/ most likely
point of the matter is that you NEED to read very carefull the entire vignette and question… underline least/most likely… this is one topic where you can game the exam by just going over 100s of q bank questions like level 1 strategy…hope this helps.
a good place to start is memorizing areas that are REQUIRED/ vs recommened (record retention/ compliance)… this is where the questions come from… also works with GIPS