At first read, I feel lost when I read the question. I am like is this even in the curriculum? 2. Then circling back and forth between the exhibits and the question, I start recollecting where I remember reading about it. 3. After that I start to solve the question, after 4 minutes at it, I get fed up. Usually my calculation don’t give me any of the a/b/c answer choices. 4. Regarding recalling formulas I am starting to forget the basics on how to calculate FCFF, what is Gordon Growth Model for calculating risk premium, what is justified P/B and when is it applicable. 5. Questions that you can only solve by drawing tables, or more than 2-3 iteration of calculations, i am getting them wrong consistently. 6. I also feel that questions on purpose are very twisted, its not like its asking you here are the variables, go calculate the Value of x, y, they’ll tell you 4 variables, 1/2 of them probably irrelevant. Then 5th one you gotta figure. Then there will be some wording around it, which you gotta remember to adjust for and it goes on.
Are you in the same boat? Not sure what’s the best strategy in next five days. My mind is a blur.
My mind is blur too man, but thanks for this, it captures what is exactly on my mind. Usually I was on point with my confidence on derivatives, but the Mock afternoon question just gave me a hard pounding.
I completely blanked on the PLN/EUR derivative set… and got most of them wrong (guessing)… but after the exam, I went over it and it was a little easier than the Swap EOCs… seems the testmakers purposely make the questions look harder and more intimidating than they really are (and the problems seem that way in the real world) so it’s kinda understandable…
It’s kinda depressing reading about people who scored 70-80+ on mocks, Schweser, etc. and did all the EoCs only to not pass… and it’s like their 3rd or 4th try.
I hope that’s not the norm… if it is, there’s no way the pass rate is even anywhere near 40%…
They wrote the semianual in the errata. But i saw it after the test. I calculated anual payments, then quartely payments, then semianual pmt to find out! It was very anoying.
Sometimes I feel like a small kid that has wandered into a Master’s level Physics exam that’s entirely in chinese. Also, one of the choices is the batman symbol.
I hate to say it, but the actual exam does the exact same thing, I have never felt that the actual exam was any easier than the mocks, I usually think it’s actually a little harder. That said, I would put good money down that there is a decent length errata for the exam. I am highly convinced that I have run into problems that I knew I could get right but the correct answer isn’t there or they didn’t give you the information to get to it so it probably ended up as one that they threw out, thus hurting my score individually as others may not have been able to answer it even with the right information given.
For me, this test seems to always come down to how well I guess on the ones I don’t know. I usually can get in the 60% range with no problem but with bad guesses I haven’t passed. So far, I haven’t been a good guesser but I’m hoping the law of averages works in my favor this year (plus I’m somewhat better prepared I think).
I forgot how to do currency swaps period so I got the first 2 wrong in that item set. Not sure if I want to study that or just hope they don’t show up on the real deal at this point.
The rest of the item set was fine, easy even so I got 4/6.
I did the morning session, taking a break and then doing the PM in an hour. I didn’t think it was that bad, but I ran out of time at the end and guessed some of the last two item sets. Everyone has said the PM is more difficult which makes sense.
Will spend the next few days doing mocks and working on time management. My biggest problem is spending too much time on any one question. New strategy may be to skip any calculation intensive questions and come back to them at the end.
I started the AM well spirited and actually proud to identify the tricks, before it turned into an educated-guess operation towards the last hour, and then purely random guessing right at the end, the consequence of waisting several minutes trying to come up with correct calculations despite having the utmost assurance I had the formula right. Calculating FCFE from CFO was stamped in my head for having reviewed it and spelled it out several times yesterday. I know the formula and understand it conceptually…still couldn’t come up to one of the proposed answers to the question that came up. So long for being able to identify the tricks…
Oh, and PM is even more brutal? I’m seriously questioning whether it’s worth getting destroyed even more (58% in AM) versus undertaking the usually straightforward EOCs and at least walk in next week with some sense that I know my stuff, and then pray for the best.
I’m glad someone here on this forum is actually brave enough to talk about how lost they feel. All I keep seeing is people scoring 70%+ on mock exams and I start to freak out.
I scored 45% on the mock - i have no idea where to go from here. Just hoping for the best.
Hopefully with enough practice in the last week I can pull this up.
In about 2 weeks of time, i have been able to jump from the 40-45 to 55-60 on finquiz exams which are pretty hard ! I’m still not overconfident, i have 10% to find in less almost a week lol.
But if it can help, here’s what i do : I altern between practice and reviewing. And when I do reviewing, it is an extensive review on specific topics. Some of my major weaknesses were in swaps, credit analysis (R45), equity (eveything about premiums, residual income), Credit default swaps, Multilinear regression.
I litterally went back to the book and did the whole chapters with the examples. I feel much more confident for these topics now and i can tell i have learned a lot. And realized Schweser is *@#!. There are so many topics, terms, methods that they just kinda skipped. And this is where the difference between fail and pass lie.
For the coming days, I will do two day of full reviewing, 2 days of full practice, and 2 days of half-half and 1 day ethics. I keep post-it on my desk for things to check out later, and whenever I discover something new, I put another post it on my fridge, this way i don’t forget it.
People were posting about scoring 10-20% higher on the mock than the online practice problems a couple months back until it got out that the practice vignettes were basically the same pool of questions, simply from different years. Id be comfortable making the assumption that a large piece of the differential was from people curving themselves on the mock (‘I was thinking about picking c’) while the automatic grading on vignettes online keeps mental accounting more objective.
you’ve seen the test, the real thing is much less tricky than the mocks. I dont think there is a meaningful group of people who are getting 80’s on practice tests before failing.
Mocks are killing me. There’s always some concept/topic that I see for the first time in some obscure corner of the curriculum. At some point, I think I have to go with just reviewing the 5 mocks (AM/PM) that I completed and start retaining all these formulas.
I’m even forgetting if I should + or - for some of these formulas. It’s that bad…
