First, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but this could be worth mentioning. There have been countless posts regarding the obscurity of the question selection, but did anyone think of the benefits in a mastery of the subject sense. FSA is a great example. They skipped two of the largest topics. The topics any candidate probably reviewed multiple times and likely right before the exam. If you were struggling, you probably focused most of your FSA energies on those topics. The key regarding mastery of the subject is if you wernt struggling. If you had your stuff together(or at least felt you were in that direction), you were able to expand your mental focus on some of the more obscure subjects. I personally believe that most of the people who passed would have likely done extremely well on those left out subjects, and it really wouldn’t have changed all that much given a constant pass rate. My advice to those who failed. Start studying a little earlier, get those big subjects down, go into the obscure stuff, review everything, obscure, review and so on. Good luck next year either way. Just my 2 cents…
The will not test emerging markets next year. Storko’s guarantee
Wow.
I think the OP has a valid point. For me I count myself as fortunate because I have a CPA and through education a good exposure to a large portion of the exam. So Equity, Corp Fin, and FSA probably take less time for me to understand. It lets me put a significant amount of focus on the remaining portion of the exam. I also tutor a lot on the side for those topics so it keeps it relatively fresh in my mind. I have a lot of respect for the people that come with little or now related background to the material and pass the exams. For example, on the FSA stuff I honestly dont know how people that arent accountants pick it up while still staying on top of the other stuff.
Thanks OP. That is exactly why I got <70 on FSA and failed. I expected what would be tested by a grad school prof and got the esoteric.
I am waiting on a Sortino ratio question next year. It’ll be about time we get a whole vignette on Treynor-Black too.
I tend to agree and I said the same the day after the exam. If they only tested the big stuff, that is all anyone would study. Might as well chop the curriculum in half then. I think people are overstating the amount of “obscure” questions as well. I can’t recall how many there were, but doesn’t seem like much more than a handful… maybe 10 at most? I guess it is subjective, so we could argue that point, but fact is there was only one large subject left off the exam (foreign subsidiary translation), so it wasn’t like the big stuff was completely ignored. So, after the big subjects are tested, what do you expect them to fill in with? 5 more FCFE calculations?