For those of you who took leve one twice in the same year (ie. failed in June and rewrote in December), how similar did you find the exams??? Were they quite similar or substantially different? Thanks in advance for your responses. Dubs
I’d be really curious to know as well. How’s your studying going, Dubs?
They werent that different when i gave them. They generally have a pattern of even ing out the difficulty of topics between the afternoon & morning sessions. eg. if ethics is easy in the morning expect a killer ethics section in the afternoon. But having said that if you have covered your topics well nothing cannot be answered. Always remember due to CFA’s grading system you are not competing for a passing score, you are competing to get a better score than the other candidates.
Diltondoyly Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Always remember due to CFA’s grading system you > are not competing for a passing score, you are > competing to get a better score than the other > candidates. Not true. CFAI’s own material on the website explains this quite clearly. I’m guessing you didn’t read much of the CFAI material. Ummm… Maybe that’s why you failed twice.
Dec 2006, took it- failed. June 2007, took it, passed. Crazily enough, the difference was studying. The tests were similar in nature, very similar and straighforward in the way they ask/word questions. The CFA material does change year to year, so for a Dec taker like me taking again in June, I had some new LOS’s to learn- econ had a lot of changes for example. Since June fail to Dec materials are the same, you wouldn’t have that problem. The CFAI is not really out to throw huge curveballs on the test. If you study the LOS’s, you should do fine. Sometimes they will ask 2 or 3 questions on the same thing while omitting other sections completely. That’s just the luck of the draw I guess, but I did notice that both times I took it. Just because you get a question in the AM section, don’t think *whew*, I won’t see that topic again in the PM session. Besides that, it honestly isn’t a sneaky or tricky test. If you study your materials, you should do just fine. It’s just not a test that you would get lucky on guessing if you borderline prepared for since there are so many topics covered that are all fair game to get tested. In a 240 question test, if you have holes, they’re going to show. But my overall sentiment as a 2 timer in L1- if you put in the time, it pays huge dividends.
Failed L1 in june 2006, then passed L1 in Dec 2006. I didn’t see any material difference in the exams, just did a better job preparing.
bannis is a whiz-kid so this prob didnt cause any problems for her, but i did see some curveballs in the way that they word the questions. They’ll throw in some double negatives and other tricks of the trade. just read the questions (and answers) carefully.
Thanks very much for your responses!