I thought the PM was super tricky with a focus on some obscure topics and some ambiguous questions… About 10 questions I couldn’t answer. Didn’t find the AM too bad, apart from Risk Management.
Wow. Am Blew me away. It exposed my weaknesses in the worst way possible. Some basic topic areas tested in what felt like the most OBSCURE ways possible. Under time pressure trying to come to what seemed a simple solution tested in a roundabout way ended up killing me. It also tested many niche areas that I was simply not spending enough time on in my preperation.
PM was a bit better but made many stupid errors out of tiredness and just not thinking straight.
Band 9/10 for me or a squeezed through pass. Unbelievable given how strong my mock scores were.
I found AM relatively easier than PM. I was hoping as well to bump results on the PM exam and I found it substantially harder than expected.
Now enjoy the Summer!
Sadly, didn’t managed time well in AM and left 17 points blank and i already know due to time pressure I made a mistake in calculation.
When doing PM, it’s like…an orphan finally found his Mom and Dad.
I wonder why by design CFA makes AM contrained for time while PM is easy. Shouldn’t it be based on candidate’s knowledge?
Pre-exam** :** I was scoring mid-60’s on AM mocks and around 75% on PM mocks. I was finishing AM mocks with 30-45 minutes to spare.
Actual exam** :**
(AM) - I finished the exam with just 5 minutes to spare. One of the subsections of Question 1 bothered me and I spent a few extra minutes than the allotted time on it. I then made this time up and got back to “even” somewhere mid-AM, but then I fell behind by approximately 8 minutes off pace. This alarmed me with about an hour left and sent me into a frenetic rush the rest of the way. I recall being annoyed at the fact I felt the last two questions were “easy”, but since I wasted so much time on previous questions I had to hurry up and perhaps didn’t supplement my responses as I otherwise would have liked. With my spare 5 minutes, I quickly flipped back over the exam, knowing I had no time to change anything and had left nothing blank – except I discovered an inadvertent missed circle of a choice in one of the sections. I must have been so rushed I forgot to circle the choice and simply explained it. Hopefully this saved me one point. I highly doubt I got in the mid-60’s on AM because it seemed to focus on some things I simply didn’t spend much time reviewing. I tended to rely a lot on the mock exams and exhibited representative bias in my studying habits, failing to review material that was not recently tested.
(PM) - Prior to PM, I couldn’t really eat because AM had me on tilt. But I found PM to be a breeze compared to AM. I finished with 25 minutes to spare and think that I knew 30 of the 60 for sure. If I get half of the rest I was unsure about (many of which I narrowed down to two choices), that’d put me in a position to maybe make up for my dreaded AM session.
Second time taker. 70 hrs of total effort this year, 30 of which were in the last 3 days. No prior morning practice tests, 170 multi-choice questions from official website averaging 69%. I knew I hadn’t prepared enough compared to last year, lacked motivation. Post exam, felt better than I did same time last year. Still left 2 full questions (approx 40 marks) so will be judged out of 140 but fairly confident I performed better than last year where I scored overall about 40-45% in the morning. I am hoping I can get to 53-55% in the morning and get 65-67% score in PM. That would put me borderline fail/pass. PM was brutal, not sure what happened there. I was caught off guard, guessing a lot more than desirable and had to work hard for many answers. Felt exposed due to lack of depth required to understand finer details of most concepts. However I probably would never have reached the depth even after studying more hours as differences were very subtle. Overall, exam was less surprising than 2017. I hope I make it or atleast improve on the Band 8 score.
my handwriting was horrible - almost illegible. do graders dock you for really messy handwriting?
on the exam, found the AM to be tough - then again i had done only one mock (the night before).
found the PM to be a walk in the park, was probably uncertain on 5 or 6, but who knows. ethics q’s were quite tricky.
AM blindsided me. I thought doing old questions from 2004 through last year would prepare me for anything but they managed to find new and unfamiliar ways of testing the material. Feel like I underestimated it because I did not find the AM papers very difficult during my practice.
Relative to AM, the PM seemed more manageable to me, but still far from what I had hoped.
And now, I can only recall the questions that I know I got wrong or am unsure about. Will be a long summer wait.
Overall I found the exam fair with no surprises or concepts I did not recognize. Yes it was worded differently but I found this years exam to be much easier for me but not because it was an easier exam or harder but because I had prepared better and knew the material well. That being said I made way too many avoidable mistakes in the morning due to too much coffee and exam stress. For starters I fell behind by 5-7 minutes and started panicking which caused me to skip a few calculation questions I knew to catch up and come back and do later at the end but I had no time to come back so left 8-15 sub parts blank which would have been easy points. PM was ok but I know I had a few too many with 2 options and bunch I changed my answer form correct to incorrect due to too much time… funny how in the morning too little time was the issue and in the afternoon too much time which both caused me to do worst than I should have. moving 30 minutes from afternoon to morning would be epical and helpful but that is wish full thinking.
At the end of the day I could be marginal pass or band 9/10, All coming down to MPS. Going into the exam I had done about full 8 exams (AM & PMs) and averaged 72% on all with none below 70% but this could be as low as 60-65% overall or as high as 70-75% with closes guess of mine 65-69%.
I would be gutted if I fail marginally as I felt I finally gave this exam a fair shot after all these years and dedicated a substantial amount of time to studying consistently basis since January.
Guess we wait now until August 28th but till then I have bigger and more important part of my life to get on with and celebrate like my marriage in 3 weeks.
VWJetty would like to hear from you and know how you did?
Cheers NVC
I think overall the test was difficult but fair.
I think relatively speaking AM was a lot easier than PM. Nothing on PM was really difficult…they tested relatively simple topics, or you think they were simple, but the way they tested those simple topics - that’s what got me on on PM.
I hated the ethics question. On almost all of them, I could rule out one bad answer. Didn’t feel too good about 50/50 guessing on ethics. On one of the questions the answer choices were very convoluted. Obviously, I can’t say too much about it, but I would say the answer choices were completely unfair. The thing that was a direct violation was not an answer choice and the thing that was not a violation was an answer choice but it also included the other choice that was a violation. In the ethics chapter, there was specific guidance for it but the answer choices did not reflect the guidance as far as what was acceptable and what wasn’t. Oh well, I guess that’s how ethics goes. It definitely felt like a new team of people were writing the questions. Both AM and PM felt very different. AM was way different than previous AM papers.
On PM, there were some questions that seemed easy , a little too easy , which made me feel uneasy!!! I remember on a couple of questions, I read the entire passage 2 or 3 times because I thought I was missing something. I still feel like I must have overlooked something, because it just couldn’t be that way. Still, compared to AM, I felt like PM was full of tricks. I’m just afraid that I missed something very obvious.
Overall, I feel like I should score ~70 or a little higher for AM, but about 60% on PM.
I want to give a big thanks to people who have helped me on here. Of course, S2000 comes on top of everyone’s list , but also my peers. I know there are many, but rexthedog and pierreCFA come to mind first (availability bias because of the logo…I should add one too). All the other folks who helped me directly on my questions, or asked a question similar to mine, I thank you all!
I guess it’s a long wait until we get the results. Is August 28 a confirmed date?
AM - I took every CFAI test going back to 2013 and reviewed '12 and '11 and what we saw on Saturday was a whole new level of minutia. It felt like they took every tough question from the past exams, reworded them adding some twists/tricks, and put them all into what we saw on Saturday. I really hope they’re generous with the partial credit.
PM was a nice break. There were a few trick questions that threw me for a loop, but in general, I think I got about a 70ish.
The biggest fear for me was not finishing all the questions in the morning session so I started out writing quickly, until I realized my handwriting was awful and I had too much time left. Went through it again and found several stupid mistakes.
I was hoping to take a nice break during the PM portion but it was much harder than I thought. Several questions seemed ambiguous, or simply because I was not prepared enough.
Was in a shock after the AM as I knew i miscalculated at least 2 problems in the morning.
PM felt a lot easier as I solved all the problems twice went to the bathroom and still had at least twenty minutes left. But after reading some of the responses here, I’m pretty confused whether it was easy or I fell for all the trick questions.
My biggest issue was the time on AM portion. I was shocked as for the AM mocks that I took (2015-2017), I was finishing 15-30 mins early. For the actual exam, I felt it was a race against time, toward the second half of the morning, I felt that I had 5 seconds to analyze and the rest to write, literally wrote the last word when they said stop writing now.
My problem was that I was writing a lot in mocks and finishing early so I did the same thing on the exam, I wrote a lot (not bullet points) which is probably why I felt rushed.
PM was harder than the mocks in my opinion. I wasn’t feeling comfortable going through the first 2-3 vignettes, but I felt it got easier afterwards.
So I don’t think I failed miserably, but I’m not very comfortable about the odds of passing either. It’s really a 50-50 at this time. All we can do it sit and wait…
I feel exactly the same about AM vs PM as you do. I haven’t seen 28th confirmed but I copied a ‘normal’ CFA year’s timeline and that means results on tuesday the 28th of August.
AM felt fair. Hardest part was trying to finish in time. Finished with 7-10 minutes left and returned to 2 sub Qs I left blank to scribble whatever I could to get points.
I was hoping to slam dunk the PM but found it to be tricky.
We’ll see what happens. Comes down to how effective I was at lobbying for partial credit in the AM.
First off I thought the exam was very fair both morning and afternoon. I tend to disagree with everyone that suggests there are “twists” or “tricks”. It only seems that way if you don’t truly know the material. When you truly know it, the answers are obvious right away in most cases. That said, I put the least amount of time into this level compared to the other 3, probably 180 hours total.
There were some things that I chose not to memorize because I felt they were more obscure and wouldn’t be asked. Of course, AM section, two of those items were on there. I immediately recognized the words but there was nothing connected to them in my memory bank lol. For those two sub-items, I wrote out the work for them and answered them, but might as well have been 0’s if not for some luck or partial credit, not huge points wise though. The problem with the AM for me was that I wrote for almost 3 hours straight and didn’t have time to review my answers with the exception of one of the two I did not really know, so I have very little feel for how I did. In practice, the written for me was always stronger than the PM, very little subjectivity as to if I got points or not on the mocks. Given that I have no true feel for how the real thing went though, its tough to estimate a score here. My worst mock written was a 63.3%, and that was the first time I had looked at or attempted any written material. So I will assume my floor is a 60%.
PM was a breeze, I ripped through the PM in an hour and a half and went through the entire test twice. Maybe 3 questions that I didn’t feel like I knew well. I felt good about my ethics, and I always scored very well in ethics practice for all three levels, but you never know and ethics was my weakest on 1 and 2 actual results. Assume absolute worst case 8 wrong here (don’t think it was truly that bad and I was comfortable with my answers however). Then if you assume maybe another 5 that I thought I knew 100% but didn’t just to be safe. If I got lucky on one of the 3 I didn’t know 100%, assume worst case on ethics, plus another 5: 46/60 > 76.6%.
Combined that would put me at a 68% if we’re assuming the worst on ethics and the AM. Is that enough to pass? Maybe/Probably, but would I be shocked to have to take this again? No. I will say though that if I had to take this a second time I would pass no question. I walked in pretty confident after the mock results, but after the morning I was talking to god, then after the pm I felt like I had a shot. I reflected the least on this level driving home compared to the other 2, I’m just all set with this whole program. What a miserable use of time over these past couple years. I already have the job I desired from initially embarking on the journey, so at this point I just am doing it because my coworkers have it.
AM - Equity was rough in my opinion… did not expect that. Otherwise I felt like the AM went well.
PM - Ethics was tricky, other than that I probably had 6-9 questions that I had to narrow down to 2 and flat out guess.
So hard to tell with these exams. Walking out of L1 I knew I passed, L2 I didn’t feel bad walking out and ended up with most of the topics > 70% (which I was surprised). Walked out of L3 feeling similar to L2… as long as your first thought walking out wasn’t “Oh Fuck” I think you’ll be alright.
Historically has it taken the full 10 weeks for L3 results to be released?
Beside Ethics, I did not feel I had to guess anything when it comes to the PM session. Originally, I had guessed 5 questions to keep the flow. I went back and 4 of my guesses were incorrect. That’s a great reason to hope. AM was not brutal for me, I know I gave it everything I got on 8 questions. 2 of the 10 questions were pretty much rambling due time mismanagement. I am a repeat offender and I looked back at my last year band 10 where I failed miserable the morning session, I said to myself, there is no way I would come back next year. ( NOT because I Overconfident but I realize that I knew a lot more to give myself a chance this year)…
Then again, it maybe all about how Curvy the " Curve Is" :-)…
Let the Excruciating wait begins… Good luck everyone…