There are 360 points on LIII.
Assuming a very reasonable MPS of 64%, you’d need to score ~230 points or ~77% (=230/300) on the remainder of the exam to have a chance to pass.
#BackToReality
I said so only cuz he left blanks LAST YEAR but still get band 9.
Just don’t believe everything you read…
#OnTheInternet
Yes, I had 9 of 10 topics in the 70% + range and 1 in the 50 - 70% range. I must have been toward the top of the bands. And yes the morning really was that bad–2 topics in the 50 -70 range and the rest below 50% and most of those were zero.
Given your excellent PM score last year, IMHO, I think if you would have got above 70 in just 2 topics of AM (and rest below 50 as well), you would have still made through. I have seen such matrices passing in the past with exceptional PM score and a very dismal AM score. Anyways, I believe this time you have a super high chance of passing! Best of luck!
This did happen. I have a liberal arts background and did a graduate program heavy in writing. I did not practice AM mocks because I heard it was an “essay” test and I am a great writer I thought. So I wrote and filled the whole page for a couple questions, even pointing out how the question could be interpreted in different ways. Answering like an economist–on this hand it could be… but on the other hand. Needless to say when they announced 30 minutes left and I had only answered two questions, panic ensued and i wrote some jibberish on a few of the other questions. It was terrible. Maybe one of the worst AM tests ever.
Thank you. I agree. Best of luck to you as well.
CFAI made time management much easier this year, max one could write for a sub question was a page. Even that was for only 40-50% of questions.
Unlike in the past where most questions would be followed by blank pages, here it was mostly template based. Probably the reason why we see much lesser reports of missed questions.
This is one particular reason i feel MPS would be higher this year ( 1-2 points i guess)
I humbly disagree here. In my center, there were several candidates who complained that AM section was too lengthy and they did not finish 20-30% of the paper. IMHO, it’s not the answer space size that matters in time management. Also, in my firm, many people appeared for LIII and most of them were not able to complete AM on time. I know it’s just a sample but we can’t generalize anything. Will come to know on D day 
Just encircling correctly will give you 2 marks out of a 6 mark question. Plain blank pages makes it difficult to get these free marks. I know quite a few people who just encircled or fill the boxes but didnt write explanations for want of time. The avg score would move up by 6-7 marks thats why i said MPS would be higher by 1-2 points (equivalent to 6-7 marks out of 360)
I think that any template-effect would only move the lower peak of the multimodal distribution closer to the higher one, but I also think that the higher peak would be the one setting the MPS.
M A Y B E I M W R O N G
The templates have been there since the 2014 exam. I dont think there was anything materially different about how the questions were templated.
Let’s give my two cents. I delayed my post till now on purpose, I wished to get out the emotional part of evaluation of my performance and be more unbiased. In short: AM - fair game, but poor time management; I’ve lost precious time on the first question where I could only input the appropriate formulas (hope in partial points). I left a sub-question (5 points) blank due to the time pressure. The rest was done well I think, let’s see what the AM black box will produce. PM - 2 guesses, no more than 10 highly educated guesses (just afraid of hidden traps), confident in the rest. If it was Level 1 or 2 exam formats I would be pretty confident in my pass but Level 3 (AM especially) is different beer, who knows. I hope and believe that on 8th of August will be among these lucky people that will celebrate! Good luck to all of you!
OMG that’s the worst strategy! AM needs twice as much attention and time as PM. If they ask for 3 points, they only look at the first 3 points, so writing more and providing a “debate” doesn’t help whatsoever. In fact, they deliberately try to avoid having people write every random possible answers to get part marks. The ones who know the material well and able to put down the correct answers as quickly as possible are they ones that will pass.
Hope that helps!
NANA
I felt like this year they took a different approach in terms of balancing morning and afternoon, mainly simplifying morning and making afternoon harder. That being said, I didn’t feel that either were particularly hard (a little surprised by the amount of people saying PM was hard given that we all survived level II), however I felt that it will take them a few more times till they iron out the morning. It should not have comprised of many smaller one-off lightly covered material. In my opinion, harder questions that focused on core knowledge makes more sense.
I just don’t see how ~50% of candidates scored higher than me… that’s my thinking for why I passed.
really having nightmares at this point… very stressful…
I see dead people…
Where I ever referred to PM as hard, I meant relative to what I’d read about PM from past years. I.e., I’d heard that L3 is about surviving AM and killing PM. Within that, I’d also hear that, if you prepare very well for AM, you’re going to find PM a bit easy. I found the PM curriculum of course easier than L2, but when I hit the PM questions on June 3, there were two topics in the middle of the exam that seemed far more difficult than any Topic Tests. I hit those TT twice before May, and a third time in the final 10 days, plus, had hit those topics in most of the 9 AMs I’d done. None of that prepared me for most of the Q’s in those 2 topics. And this is fine – I’m glad CFAI makes it hard, and maybe if I’m back I’ll do more EOC or BB, or read the text more. But regardless, if you’re an ace at TT and past AM’s, and you don’t even recognize how to approach like 8-9/12 MCQ questions in the middle of an exam, I can’t see that as being an easy exam.
That’s what I am thinking about and use only official readings except for derivatives.
Why not official for everything?.. honestly derivatives are well explained in official.