I think the candidates take the exam more seriously than CFAI. I studied hard and I was hoping to demonstrate how well I know the important stuff. Instead, CFAI chose to ask AM questions that do not reveal who has mastered concepts but rather shows who can regurgitate trivia from the footnotes. What a stupid way to set an exam. I feel cheated - if I fail while X passes, I won’t feel that X has better knowledge of the fundamentals that I do.
I have taken tough exams before and I never felt this way. Usually they were difficult because of the complexity or the difficulty in bringing disparate ideas together. That would be perfect for Level III in CFA since it does tie all the different threads together in a few important areas - e.g. portfolio management, capital market expectations, strategic allocation and risk management.
Instead, CFAI concentrated on isolated crap that makes no difference in real life. Shame on them.
Is is possible to pass without having answered one full question in the AM session. ? If there is sectional cuttoff separately in morning session, then i dont know how is that possible.
it’s overall score. so just remember the am and pm sessions are equally weighted. say the mps was 70%. if you rocked the pm and got 90, say even 80… that would mean you could get a 60% on the am session and still hit 70% mps easily. so just remember that there’s two sessions to the exam, don’t underestimate the importance of the pm. check some of the results threads from last year. a lot of people passed and didn’t rock the am by any means, but they did well on the pm
does someone in CFAI have an ax to grind against Schweser and other “Cliff Notes” people? The poor Cliff Noters are going to emphasize the core portion of the curriculum, and CFAI does not want to pass candidates who don’t read their textbooks but read the Schweser Notes alone. That’s one reason why the AM paper was so obscure.
Next year, Schweser will try to include the trivia that showed up on this year’s paper and CFAI will keep one move ahead by setting a paper geared towards whatever Schweser did not think was important enough to include. So the Cliff Notes guys could never win.
OP, the alternative perspective is that there were some people that learnt the obscure things as well as the core concepts. There are only two ways for CFA to measure this. One would be to hold 20 x 6hr exams for each level so that you can be comprehensively assessed on all material. Or hold 1 exam that includes a random assortment of concepts. The fact that a few obscure things show up allow the people that REALLY know 100% of the material to distinguish themselves from those that know, say 90% of it.
It is frustrating though… I’ve been there and feel your pain.
The frustrating part is that, in real life, internalizing 90% of the material really well is far more important than knowing 100% of the material bookishly. I thought CFA was a practical exam, not so theoretical, but I was wrong. It’s not like finance is theoretical physics with their flights of fancy about superstrings. It’s the most practical subject that exists. Which is why the academic focus was jarring.
EDIT:
It’s not a bad idea to hold 5 3-hour exams and then they can test everything thoroughly; you won’t hear me whine about obscure material.
So your issue isn’t that obscure stuff comes up in the exam - its that the obscure stuff shouldn’t be in the cfa material in the first place. I think there is some merit in that argument. I don’t think the exam should just focus on the ‘core’ concepts. Because then people who took shortcuts (eg, schweser to name one) would be unfairly rewarded and those that painstakingly covered all of the ‘candidate body of knowledge’ as defined by CFAI would be unfairly punished.
Overall, my point is that CFAI should stop worrying about whom they are rewarding/punishing and focus on what they want candidates to truly know. So yeah, in theory they want us to know the whole CBOK including GIPS trivia. In reality, to help us be better analysts, they should concentrate on the bedrock concepts like portfolio management. A really good money manager could easily fail the AM exam, which is a pity.
Completely agree. I really felt I had mastered that material, then they went for all the one-offs and “academic” questions about concepts that were not at all part of the core.
I don’t know what I can do more next year if I fail. I really thought I knew this.
What footnote stuff you are talking about OP? I found most of the material was from book and Schweser too covered most if not all of them. Q-2 and Q-3 were little tricky but apart from that all questions in AM was fair game.
PM was beast and very very tricky. I don’t how did I do in that.
I think the problem is that the exam can only cover maybe 20% of the curriculum. So even if you know 90% of the material, you could be unlucky and get ~50%. Whereas someone else that only knows 20% could be very lucky and get ~100%. But everyone knows this going in. Even small gaps in your knowledge can have a big impact on your result.
The test can be frustrating but some perspective helps.
The idea that there are candidates out there that just learn the “trivia from the footnootes” and pass the exam is really unrealistic. Even if 20% of the exam was obscure information, if the candidate only focused on obscure concepts they would still be at a loss for 80% of the exam.
In reality the candidates who pass have a very good grasp of core concepts and a lot of the “obscure” parts as well. There are no candidates out there gaming the system and only learning 20% of the material and passing. If there were then they should start playing the lottery with that type of ability.
The CFA does not want an exam that tests core concepts over 5 or 6 3 hour exams. The purpose is not to have another graduate degree program i.e. If you have enough time and money you will get it. They want an exam that hopefully differentiates candidates. They are attempting to do that by creating a test that is broad enough and random enough that you must master nearly all the concepts in order to pass. Not just memorizing each concept one at a time.
Nevertheless, it can be frustrating. But remember, many people fail multiple times. No one in the industry cares how long it took you to get it as long as you finally do.