do you know when will we get the result by email ? i dont think i can survive util that day
I know I did pretty bad. There seemed to be too many questions which overworked my average memory!!! If December was bad - this was worse - bcos I thought I was better prepared! If someone could finish the paper in one hour - well must be a suppa genius! Just wondering if a 40 year old Mom taking CFA with last work experience 4 years back - any help???
I agree with some of RobJames comments. The test throws in q’s which refer to one small paragraph in the middle of some volume that is not core to the underlying concept and no financial analyst working today really needs to know. Those are there to potentially lower your score and reduce pass rates. But if pass rates were 95% then it might make the charter less meaningful. I know a lot of people in finance who think they can pass because they work as an analyst in IB or on buy side. Clearly that group will have a harder time passing unless they guess right on all the questions that can only be known my memorizing all 6 volumes. So I’m hoping that many of here who put in a lot of effort to learn the material get good enough grades so we can move on.
results will likely arrive last week of July. They have to tabulate all the scores find out what the top 1% score was and then basically set it at some range of that which is normally 70%-ish. I hope the top 1% did not crush it this year but from what I have read, no one has scored 70% on the test and not passed. So you would really have had to get 80 questions wrong to be not pass (unless MPS was low). While I could not count that many (I know I got at least 15 wrong for sure), the ethics is a bit subjective and I’m sure some q’s I think I nailed probably had trick wording that messed me up.
“The test throws in q’s which refer to one small paragraph in the middle of some volume that is not core to the underlying concept and no financial analyst working today really needs to know.” Exactly - it’s BS. If I had been lucky enough to have read that particular paragraph the night before, you would get the question right simply because it’s fresh. It doesn’t matter that you know the extended Du Pont equation or calculating indirect cash flow backwards. This is how you get some people who ‘under prepare’ by just skimming the material and pass first time. You can over prepare for the CFA 1 quite easily. Also, I’ve realized you really can cram for the CFA and study right up until the exam begins. Some people say that you shouldn’t look at material during the break but I disagree with that too now. I looked at stuff and probably got about 4 questions in the second half right purely because I had re-read the definition or equation during the break. If you’re a witness to a murder, the police don’t tell you to go home and take 24 hours to chill. They want to hear your story right now since it’s freshest and you can still remember the most detail.
2nd. whether i retake 1 or take 2 next year i’m bringing my notes and studying everything that didn’t come up in the morning session. dumb move on my part.
Congrats to everyone who sat for the exam. This was my second time taking L1 ( I failed in December band 10) so I am hoping that I was able to pick up those few extra points this time around. I was pretty devistated to learn that I failed L1 in December but doubt I would have been prepared to sit for L2 either way. So I spent the last three months brushing up on my weak areas financial reporting and analysis and quant. I was pretty confident in my level of preperation this time around as I was scoring in the mid 70’s - low 80’s on the Kaplan mock exams and got a 77 on the CFAI mock. That being said it is still tough to figure out if I passed or not. I have spent the past few days beating myslef up over the 10 - 15 questions I know I got wrong. Exam results can not come soon enough. If i don’t ace it this time I might have to opt for the CIMA or something easier (like grad school!) Best of luck to everyone!
Something that hasn’t really come up too much is the number of no-shows in the testing centers. The group in front of mine (I didn’t really bother turning around to see my section) was at most half full; also, the seat next to mine was empty. Those no-shows automatically fail, increasing your odds of passing.
I believe that no shows are not taken into account.
Correct - no shows are not taken into account. Nor are people who sat the first half but did not come back for the second half.
I feel the same way as afternoon was harder not much harder but definitely was guessing at a few more questions. Maybe odd as felt test was harder than the Schwesser mocks as had done 84% on the exam 3 morning two days before. Big surprise was the CFA afternoon mock having two of the answers on the exam which shows bad quality control on their part. Definitely a few questions I hope they throw out as they were impossible and not indicative of a person who deserves to pass the level 1. Either way I am done with Level 1 as have no plans to take in December if I did not pass.
I thought the first few sections of the afternoon exam were more difficult then the first few sections of the morning, however I thought the reverse for the last few categories. Towards the end of the afternoon session I felt as though for every 10 questions there were only 2 or 3 I wasn’t totally sure on. Anyone feel the same? I guess only time will tell! I agree with most of you who say that the exam tested some pretty irrelevant stuff… so much of what seemed critical knowledge/mathematical funcations weren’t included. I found I really had to use logic/practical thinking and process of elimination on some of the more peculiar questions. From what I hear 70% you almost certainly pass, 60% you’ll fail, 65% is borderline. I suggest trying to forget about it until the end of July… Relax and enjoy your summer people…
I think, the Exam was fair. I expected it to be far more difficult. Don’t want to say that I passed, but I feel that I had a chance to pass it. I definitely can’t blame CFA Institute if I did not pass. If i screwed it up, it was my fault. But I don’t want to look at my notes again… In fact, I already forgot about most of the questions. What really makes me confident ist the fact that peple around me were less prepared than I was. Talked to a view who did not take a single mock exam. One guy thought, he will pass if he scores 50%, etc.
Same as most thought AM was fairly easy and PM very hard. One thing to mention though is I thought the same with the CFA mock, although not to the same extreme. I thought CFA mock AM was easy but did worse than I thought I would and thought CFA mock PM was hard but I did a lot better than I thought I would. All together I only did a couple of points better on AM. So I think it could be hard to gauge. That being said, I really feel I did well in the morning (same for most). In the CFA mock AM I got a 78% and I think I did as well in the real CFA AM. I therefore find it hard to believe the possibility stated above that the passing grade could be 65%. This would mean that I would only have to get a 52% in the afternoon to average out to 65%. I really have no idea, but it is just hard to believe espcially b/c everyone thinks they did well in AM. One positive thing is that the girl next to me studied for only one week before. I think there are a lot more people like that, and that should help us folks out a lot. I was in Javits and found the noise very distracting. If I did not have earplugs I definitely would have failed as I need total concentration. The worst were the high heels that I could hear clomping back and forth even with my earplugs in, they should not let people wear those things.
We are all probably slightly biased to the downside. Typically you will remember the ones you got wrong or could have got wrong because you spent more time agonizing over them and thinking about them - they scarred your brain! It’s unlikely you will even remember the ones you got in two seconds because they are gimmies and you didn’t have to really think about them at all.
The more i read about how they calculate MPS the more i believe its the following way. take the top 1% and multiply it by .7. Pass everyone who gets above that. so if the top 1% gets 100%, pass everyone who gets 70. If the top 1% got 90% avg, pass everyone who got a 63. and in reality i highly doubt the top 1% have score less than 92% ever.
yea i’m guessing the MPS is somewhere around 66-69
I agree with most of the people here. I think the AM session was a lot simpler than the PM session. However, in the PM session, I found some sections really easy (or maybe I didn’t realize that they weren’t as straight-forward as I thought they were), but I found some other sections really hard. I did not cross-check my answers with my notes after the test, though, so who knows! Time management was not a issue as I finished AM session at about 11:15am and took about 20 minutes more for the PM session. It was so tired by around 2:30pm or so; so that might explain it a bit. I also agree that they tested a lot of the small minute details from the books - which I overlooked, or did not focus on - some sentence in the middle of some paragraph in some seemingly-not-so-important LOS.
dang it, i did the same mistake for both am and pm. It’s gonna haunt me for quite some time now… Just felt that I could be more prepared. Nevertheless, i think the questions weren’t too hard, but then again, anything can happen. And I would think that the answers are tricky rather the questions being obscure. On schweser, scored 72-78%, though i wasn’t fully prepared before doing them. Hopefully I would be blessed to pass this exam. Hopefully the students this year round wouldn’t be that smart (highly unlikely). Just curious, if those people registered but didn’t take the exam are not counted as failed, then i guess that wouldn’t make much of a difference to the MPS, since those not present will likely be mostly unprepared. so if about 40k students took L1 this time around, there would be 400 of the highly intellectual dude that would set the MPS.
People who registered but didn’t take the exam are NOT considered when they calculate the overall pass rate.