With 6 1inch + volumes of material to know, the test is only 120 questions… are you kidding me?? With the amount of content to test on, the test should be longer in my opinion (240 questions) so you have more opportunity to show what you know. I still can’t believe there were no free cash flow q’s on the 2008 exam, FCF valuation is the cornerstone of equity analysis so without key topics like that (and others) what is the test really testing anyway??
also the new 2008 L2 reading on Time Series was not even tested
^But thats a major reason the test is so difficult. THere is a ton of material that COULD be tested but only a bit actually IS. So you have to know EVERYTHING.
I had a prof in college that liked to give 3-question final exams. His rationale was that you would have to know everything to do well because the consequence of brushing over some of the topics and having one of those topics turn out to be a question would mean dropping several letter grades on just one wrong answer. And not knowing two of the questions would be an absolute failure. I’m not saying it’s right, but it was effective. You couldn’t get by with knowing 70% of the material really well and just not bother with the other 30%. If that were the case, everyone would just not bother with the most difficult 30% of topics.
More Cowbell Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > also the new 2008 L2 reading on Time Series was > not even tested Now that just pissed me off.
LOL. yeah, a 6 hour test isn’t long enough. that’s the point with 120 questions. you have to know EVERYTHING because some things will show up, others won’t. you want to try to game it and get lucky, go for it. maybe it could work, but chances are if you don’t study like crazy for everything, you’ll be toast. i’d put $$ on a FCFF/FCFE item set in 2009 and plan to study it just as I studied it in 2008, but I just don’t get how this test is somehow unfair or the wrong length. i want to start inserting sports analogies here… it’d be like a baseball player complaining about a game in the rain or something. c’mon! the conditions are the same for all players. you either adapt and deal or you make excuses. the only section i remotely agree with you on is PM. the amount of PM material vs those 6 questions is pretty insane, but again, if you want to ace PM you are just going to have to put in the time so if Treynor-Black shows up, you’ve got it. If the minimum variance frontier shows up, you’ve got it. I would’ve put $$ guessing ICAPM would’ve been there and I took a lot of time b/t PM and econ studying the international side, but oh well. So be it, maybe we’ll see it in 2009. it’s all fair game and I think 120 q’s only is a good way to do it because it exposes weaknesses and makes a candidate study their weak points. it’s not forgiving, but it’s fair and everyone tests with the same test and the same tools. no way this test needs to be more than 120 q’s.
good response bannisja. I couldn’t agree more - there are a tonne of areas that I wish the exam tested to really show what you know, but we don’t need the exam to cover a full week of writing…if you know everything well, 120 or 1200 questions should not matter a whole lot
let’s not forget that many of the questions tested more than one LOS, particularly the statement 1/statement 2 questions. however i agree that some core concepts were missing - time series, FCFF/FCFE, no bi-nomial trees - are you kidding me, i studied every variation of those!?!?! overall, while some individual questions were clearly not fair, the test overall was fair IMO.
Jodi from Schweser says the never tested that time series stuff even when it was at Level III, by the way. The argument is a pretty good one – more questions reduces the influence of luck in topic choice. But this would require a two day exam, of course!
CFP exam was two days (10 hrs). Of course there was only one of them, but the more you study the more you should want a longer test.