The CFA Level 3 morning session is a lot like the first time you have sex. You will not be very good at it. You need to order up a bunch of hookers “mock tests” and practice on those. Let them teach you how to be a good lover so that come next June when you meet the women of your dreams you make her climax and fall in love with you.
When you start doesn’t matter and neither does what you use to learn (CFAI, Schweser). What does matter is when you start studying for the actual exam.
Someone else called The Exam the “Hidden Study Session” and that is dead right. I think people fail the exam because they don’t get enough practice actually doing it. So get your d*ck wet many times before exam day.
Get yourself to the point where you are familiar enough (and doesn’t have to be that familiar as these are just hookers afterall) with the material that you can start going over practice exams over and over again. The sooner you get to that point the better. Everything that happens before that doesn’t really matter.
I would suggest getting to this point by 1.5 months before the exam or earlier with the goal of spending at least 100-150 hours repeatedly banging “dead hookers.” It doesn’t matter if you fail these exams miserably. Why? Because these are just hookers and not the woman of your dreams. Disappoint the hookers, not your dreamgirl. You will see yourself getting much better and you will develop an intuition for the rhythm that you need. I didn’t even bother grading myself most of the time. It doesnt matter much at the start - because these are just hookers.
Round up every dead hooker “past morning sessions” and breathing hooker “mock exams” and do them over and over again. Do no more than one question (morning session) or item set (aftrnoon) at a time. Check your answers immediately. If there is a formula involved make a flashcard for it. Take note of it.
You will start to notice, and I mentioned in another thread, that certain questions get asked over and over again. These are usually calculation questions. Level 3 is light on calculation questions and therefore any calculation you see in the curriculum has a high probability of being asked. This goes double for readings like Econ where their literally are maybe two calculations in the whole Study Session.
Make a list of the questions and practice them often. Some examples include:
a) Calculate The Taylor Rule
b) Calculate Safety Margin
c) Calculate Implementation Shoftfall
d) Calculate duration of leveraged equity
e) Turn stock with beta 1.X to synthetic cash, or some variation
f) Calculate Cobb Douglass
You will see questions like these things over and over again in mocks and released morning sessions. There is a high chance you will see them in your exam. They are the only “sure things” in the level 3 exam and you want to get every single one of them right, because the rest of test is a crap shoot, and I’ll explain that now.
Conversely, you will also notice that a lot of topics and even whole study sessions rarely see the light of day on test day. You don’t want to waste a lot of time on those. Identify them and ignore the as much as is sensible.
THE CRAP SHOOT:
The morning session in particular, but also the afternoon session, will feel much more subjective than levels 1 & 2. In fact, you’ll see in previously released exams that sometimes the CFA is forced to actually have more than one correct answer because people make convincing arguments otherwise. That doesn’t usually happen though; usually it’s their answer or you are wrong. So mitigating that is difficult.
You will be given Portfolio Management questions that will be unique and different from every single one that you have seen before. However, how you approach these is the same. Practicing them over and over again will give you an idea of how to approach them and allow you to at least have a fighting chance on test day. If you do enough of them these become very formulaic once you write down all the math inputs that are necessary. Here’s a basic rubric, but I’m sure someone else could write a better one, for dealing with these Port Man/Private wealth/Institutional Investor questions.
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Read the essay, take note of all math inputs.
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Set them up like an accountant would. Write them down neatly, so the CFAI knows what you are doing and gives you credit for it. Label everything
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Calculate either required return or what value you need
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Don’t forget about inflation or taxes at the end. Label these too.
Test Day:
A.M. - You will be time constrained in a way that you have not been prior to level 3. I would suggest skipping the first few questions, which most likely based on past released exams, will be portfolio management related. I would go to some of the later topics that you consider strengths. These questions are much less subjective, less time involved, and I think generally easier to score well on. There is some easy low hanging fruit there which you want to get and will not want to miss because you are rushed and running out of time.
Then turn your attention to the Port Man questions and try not to hemmorage all over it - so try and stay above 50%.
P.M. Will be a lot like level 2 except you will be less time constrained because there is much less calculation.
Bottom Line:
You want to score well on P.M. and just avoid bleeding yourself out on the A.M. People with lopsided morning/afternoon sessions did not seem to pass nearly as frequently as people who maybe were in the fifties to seventies on both the morning and afternoon. CFAI doesn’t seem to like variance in returns from candidate answers. I wonder why they would have this bias? Maybe they have a “Candidate Sharpe Ratio?” 
Finally, it can still go either way. Accept in advance that there is a little bit of luck and a lot of variance in this. Don’t blame yourself if it goes wrong. Just enjoy your summer and get back up on the horse next spring and take your shot again.
Good Luck. I’m a certified math retard and I did it. Anyone can. (well within reason)
