Hi,
I have seen posts where people mention that they get so and so % on their AM mocks. How do you grade yourself given that there are partial marks and I could not find a grading scheme on CFA’s website?
Compare your answers directly to the CFA guidelines. You need to be highly objective though and grade yourself as if someone else was looking at your paper. Don’t say “oh well, I sort of got it right so I’ll give myself full points.”
Negative, Ghostrider – not how this works. If you got it wrong, you got it wrong and you get partial/no points. If your answer was supposed to be a positive 5 but you wrote a negative 5, that’s zero points.
Be ultra conservative and if you are finding that you are passing each time while being as tough as possible on yourself, then you will pass.
Good advice. Thanks!
To your second paragraph, I thought that if you showed your work and had basically the entirely correct formulas and thought processes demonstrated and just ended up with the wrong sign at the end that it was worth partial credit? So if that was worth three points you’d at least get one point?
Or are you just saying to grade yourself as if it’s a zero when in reality it would be worth 1?
What about if a question has a template and you’re asked to circle one of three answers. You get the circle correct but your justification doesn’t match the guideline answer. Is that partial credit or no credit?
Out of three marks available I’d give that one mark for the correct selection and then 2 marks for the explanation (if selection is correct and explanation is correct)
If selection is wrong, then explanation bit is given zero by default.
Thats how Schweser do it.
Makes sense. Thanks!
Ltj, I remember reading somewhere that if you circle the right answer, but your justification doesn’t support your answer, you get 0 points. Along those lines, this is what is written when you login to CFA website, in the “feedback from graders” section: “If the question requires a decision (e.g., command words Determine or Recommend),clearly state your decision. When your intent is unclear to the grader, or contradictory information is included in an answer, no points are awarded.”
Contradictory information is very different from “incorrect” information. I guess if you recommend one thing and then go and totally contradict yourself in the answer, you may well get 0. But if your explanation was just “not what they were looking for”, rather than directly contradictory you would still get the one mark for correctly determining surely?
Maybe also the rules are different for “written” recommendations vs the ones you circle in a box etc.
Who the hell knows…this is part of the reason I am very much not enjoying L3. It’s the first level I’ve felt like I may not nail it, even if I put in the work. It’s a bloody crap shoot…
a theory I heard was if it was a 3 point question. circling the right answer gives you 1, and the explanation gives you the other two. If you get the initial answer wrong, then they wont even bother looking at your work and you automatically lose the other two points.
That being said, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. I never said what i heard was accurate 
I play it conservative and try to match as much as possible they provide. For example IPS questions any little part or liquidity event I miss -1 then at the end I just base it off a percentage since i’m sure some things are more than just 1 point.
And i try to be as honest as possible if what I wrote would really come through to a Charterholder grading my exam. If I even remotely have to question myself then -1. I’m assuming all graders all going to be A-Holes, laughing at all the dumb answers written lol so hopefully that discipline will help me.
Good question. Yes, you would get partial credit for writing the formula correctly (which by the way, you always should even if not asked, for this exact reason). However, if this is worth 1 point and the answer is worth 3 points, you get 25% correct.