Finally took a look at last year’s exam (morning section). I have to say that I was shocked to see all of the points I missed. Overall, I felt that the test was really fair, but I had a really bad day. Things like missing the micro vs. macro performance attribution. Things I knew from just my daily work weren’t even coming to mind. Also, realized that my preparation sucked in terms of quality time. Feel really bad about the opportunity I missed, but feel a lot better about what is coming.
Yeah, I had the same issue…last June…
is that exam the same as the ones provided on the cfai website?
I dont think the actual exam and those provided on the website are the same.
To me it seem, that CFAI remove some of the “punch” from the last years’ exams before posting them on the CFAI website.
They are supposed to be the same. But you are not the only ones to say otherwise
I believe the exams on the CFAI website are verbatim what we saw last June.
big ML would you be willing to elaborate on why your prep sucked last year in quality? did you use cfai or schweser? did you use secret sauce? What your doing different this year to improve?
Last week, I had my worst week of studying since janurary and realize with only 60 days to go, i need probably 3+ hours a day to feel somewhat prepared come june 2nd. The nerves are starting to set in…
Thanks
There were several reasons…
My son was born in early March, so my schedule was quickly thrown out of whack. Even when on paternity leave I wasn’t getting the uninterupted study time I had grown used to on prior levels. Went something like, work for a half hour, something comes up and have to put the books down, study for an hour, get interupted and so on and so forth. I was also about 6 months into a new, pretty difficult job. So, time was an issue.
Adding insult to injury, because of the aforementioned time issues I chose to hold off on most of the essay questions and quite a few of the CFAI questions until April and May. Not a good strategy as I should have been practicing the essay questions and theCFAI questions the entire time. However, becuase I knew I was likely to be interupted I spent a lot of time doing the Stalla qbank, something short where if I had to stop I wasn’t “in the middle” of something.
Lastly, I saved all of the CFAI past exams and most of the practice exams for the last two weeks. There just wasn’t enough time to do all of them and thoroughly review them. I bought the BSAS exam and never even got to it.
I used Stalla, and I feel that the Schweser materials are a bit better. Without Peter Olinto the videos were a bit flat and looking at the 2011 exam against the Schweser materials they seem to be fairly in line with what was tested.
That’s the long story. Short story is I didn’t plan well enough, nor did I prepare the way that works best for me.