CFA Sample Exam 1 - 50%. first exam taken. after most wrong questions, i read the answer and realized it was a really stupid mistake i made and that the question wasnt hard at all. i think i need to get used to the cfai wording of questions. in general, is it normal to get a score like this and be in the 70s by the following week. as you can imagine, getting a score like this after studying since january is a bit of a shock.
That’s not bad man, for a first test. Only need to bump it up by 20% with 3 weeks remaining!
i got a 61 on sample exam 1 for level 1, and a few days later i was scoring low 70s on schweser–so im hoping for something similar. the free cash flow balance sheet completely confused me–i got 0/6 on that.
one sample exam is not a good sample. the key for me in the remaining weeks it to remain focused and not to panic. i’m sure i’ll go through some bad moments, but just have to pull out of the panic mode quickly and get back to focused study. forget about that score.
agreed. i got 60 on that one and 50 on the other one. but when i logged into the CFAI website to take the sample mocks, i came across my scores for the Level 1 mocks from last year. I posted 60, 66 for those and still managed to pass with fairly strong scores. actually, given that we have a finite amount of time left and only so much we can study, I think it can work to your favor to score low on the mocks and samples. If I posted an 80% or 90%, I might get overconfident in my abilities when all that really happened is I got lucky with the question selection. Scoring in the 50-70% range lets you know your in the general ballpark, but you still need to bust your ace until exam day and not let up. If I scored an 80, I might be more inclined to study less and not push myself to know as much of the material as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I would be happy to score that high, but all that really matters in the end is the actual exam and batch of questions we get. My coworker said that when he took Level 2 last year, it seemed to be that the vignettes would ask questions from all over the material. On the sample mocks, it seems to ask questions like 4 at a time that are from the same study session. Basically he said he did not feel like the exam cheated him and asked questions from all over the place. I only bring this up because the sample mocks might not be as close to the real exam as you would think. Correct me if I am wrong though second timers.
yea we need some second times to tell us about Level 2 schwesser vs. real exam.
I didn’t track my scores on Schweser tests (bk 6) last year, but I thought they were harder than the real exam. I thought the real exam was more straight forward, less trying to figure out what they were asking and less trying to find pertinent info. Ethics was harder than expected on the real thing. I got under 70 for the first time on the real exam. I recall it being frustrating trying to figure out the answers for ethics. I also did poorly on equities (less than 50%)…which was generally my strongest area. I recall one vignette being very hard (I simply couldn’t come up with a couple of calc’s).
Sample 2: 66 Still a few q that I knew I should have gotten right that I missed. Still lots and lots of work to do but confidence temporarily cautiously increased.
I wouldn’t too much into your scores. 30 questions is such a small sample size, at best it just points out what you need to work on of the areas that were covered in that particular test. Some people with scores in the 80’s last year failed and some people with less than 70 still passed on the real thing. The important thing is to keep improving upon what you already know and filling in the gaps. Hopefully, come d-day, it’ll pay off!
yea youre right. more important than the score is that i actually felt better, more comfortable doing this test. so hopefully this is what picks up.
I got well above a 70 last year (don’t remember how much) and I failed by a wide margin. Those sample tests (30 questions) do not indicate how well you will do in the actual exam. If anything the questions in the sample exams are a joke compared to the ones I saw last year on the exam. Same thing in level 1, I had a 60% in the sample exams (or less) and I managed to ace almost every single section except for derivatives. So these scores don’t represent the exam, they should help focus your studying in the last few weeks.