if you took the exam last year and have had a chance to look at the 2006 questions published in the text and schweser, would you say they were similar in difficulty except for the T/B curveball? sorry if this is a painful question.
I would say, with the exception of FSA (and maybe Ethics) the 2007 exam was harder than 2006.
Last year, you had the easy sections (Economics, FSA, Equity & Fixed Income). If you did a minimum of review, you would have gotten these right, but that didn’t matter because everybody got those right. So, even though their weight is suppose to be huge, the fact of acing (and knowing 100% of the curriculum related with these sections) didn’t matter a bit. Ethics, Quant, Derivatives & PM were another story (extra hard). So, if you were a master of derivative/quant and read the remaining of the curriculum, you were lucky last year. I do hope that the CFAI will not play that game again, and that the topics with big weight will matter.
Economics was on the growth theories. FSA was on removing unusual items. Equity: Franchise P/E, Growth Factor, Franchise Factor (you just had to plug the numbers into the formula, no need to understand theunderlying concepts) Fixed income: Duration & Convexity (again, just plug the numbers, Level 1 curriculum) Yep, the other crazy thing that they did last year was to test only 1-2 LOS per section. So if you knew these LOS cold, you were lucky. If you didn’t, well … too bad.
so you had to know the formulas for duration and convexity? i don’t think i could spit that out right now because i haven’t been focused on it. stuff i should know… thanks.
I have a real problem with this Minimun Los approach we are already getting less questions than last year which hurts because of the massive extent of curriculum. shitzs