With all due respect, what did you expect from only studying two months? LIII AM is the most difficult part in all of the exams. I put in seven months and wrote six notebooks full of practice for AM. I get your point that it is six textbooks and they can test you from any part of the curriculum but putting in only two months of work I find it difficult to reasonably expect anything else. I am glad they make it hard to earn the Charter. They shouldn’t hand it out like participation trophies.
Haha yep. A’s were early and the B’s in the middle or end, can’t remember. Also had a stretch of BCBCB
The AM session for me was on the expected lines. Five of my colleagues who are CFA charterholders had warned me that given the stress and the usual intent to perhaps throw up all we know of a topic, missing out of 1-2 questions is a most likely event.
So, i changed my approach and took first 10 minutes to glance through the whole paper to mark the specific areas where i was confident.
I could find 8 questions wherein i maxed out my answers quality both in terms of content as well as handwriting supplementing my answers with equations where necessary focussing on command words and so on. I was left with 25 minutes and 2 questions unanswered which did panic me by the end. Therefore, i ended up with 3 sub-parts of a question unanswered. So, while there was a disappointment, there was also a relief that i had attempted 80% of the paper to the best of my ability. Based on my past AM papers score analysis, i have had 65-70% accuracy on attempted questions. I believe 50-55% in AM looks pretty achievable for me and i confess i had not built in better than 60% in AM.
Coming to the PM session, apart from 5-6 questions (3-4 ethics and a couple more questions from other section), the paper seemed much easier than the Institute mocks. Even building in some errors due to the so called tricky questions, i believe 75+% seem gettable.
Gut says it might be just enough but lets see…
PS: I had created the user id to motivate myself to complete all three levels in least possible time but alas it wasn’t meant to be (courtesy the shifting of exams to June end vs. beginning earlier). I would rather be termed as Target~19months now 
Had several A’s in the first two vignettes of PM. Remember another string of B’s later on but I don’t think ever had more than 4 in a row of anything.
Thought AM was alright, definitely difficult and probably more so than the mocks I had completed. First section was a struggle and couldn’t figure out one of the calculations in a middle section. I know I got a 5 point question wrong on the first section, but should be awarded 2/5 there. I debated that section for a long while, unfortunately went the wrong direction.
PM went better, first half was tough then got into cruise control on the second half. Finished in 90 minutes and then took the exam again to review answers. I think I changed 4 answers, 2 for sure from wrong to right and the other 2 I think I caught the CFA traps but who knows. Hoping for a 55-60 AM and 65-70 PM
I had a lot of two letter repeats, AA, BB, CC, until the last part part there was a string of about 5 C’s.
After both L1 and L2, I told myself “So, the actual exams are easier.” Not after L3.
I did the actual AM papers from 2015-2017 and reviewed 2014 AM, but this year’s AM gave me this unfamiliar feeling and I agree that maybe we had a new team of question writers this year. Thankfully I managed to finish the paper but I had to write non-stop and my palm was sweating like hell and even soaked the exam paper a bit. That never happened to me during the mocks.
PM definitely had its share of tricky questions but was fair overall. Again, I didn’t find many questions that looked similar from the online test bank.
So I think it really comes down to how well I have mastered/learned the material.
LOL read on another forum that Boston was an absolute shitshow (no pun intended) with people getting stuck in the bathroom, test started way late, multiple people getting kicked out bc of bathroom line and apparently someone even got arrested?
It’s funny that things seem to come down in a similar fashion for me. Let’s hope we did enough to mitigate those misses in those 2 questions. I really feel I did enough to get me over the bump given the fact I failed last year with a band 10…
The graders are all retired pharmacists; they can read anything.
I took it in Boston. The bathroom line was a s-show and a few people did get written up (well, at least the main proctor told someone to write them up, I don’t know if they actually did it) but no one got arrested, to my knowledge at least. There were probably 2-3 thousand people in a giant room (at least 2/3 male I’d guess) and there were only 2 mens rooms, one each at opposite ends of the room, each with 2 urinals and 2 stalls. The head proctor called for people to get back to their seats at around 8:40 but most people (myself included) didn’t leave the line. Eventually they let the men still waiting use the ladies room since it was empty. Logistically, it was an absolute mess. Getting in and out during breaks was a nightmare and after the afternoon session we couldn’t even go out through the same entrance we came in through (where the personal belongings room was) because of a private event.
Mind boggling that it’s even legal to only have 8 toilet/urinals for 2 thousand people crammed in a room
At the NYC location I was at, a proctor’s cell phone rang two times during the AM session. That was unpleasant…
I was in a NYC hotel banquet hall, not far from the doors leading into a hallway where the bathrooms were. Every time a candidate walked in or out the door would slam super loudly. Also very unpleasant and distracting.
San Diego had one bathroom each for men and women for about 1,000 people… the men’s room only had two pots and there was a line of about 30 guys stretching out into the hall waiting anxiously to take a dump at about 8:40am… talk about pressure building up before the exam! 
I can’t believe CFA can’t at least provide port-a-potties to accommodate large crowds.
They provide diapers for those who have forgotten to poop at home. I told you.
Reading these comments I’m wondering if I did a completely different paper or the practice paid off as AM wasn’t as challenging as you guys are saying but I didn’t do more than the last three official papers, cfa n schweser mocks and the schweser practice exams vol 1
I think it all comes down to time management. If you fall behind and get super rushed even the easiest of CFA exams would become a total nightmare. Personally I don’t think 2018 AM was any harder than 2012-2017.
Last year majority said that AM wasn’t challenging and that PM was. I can recall only one whose final results was proved with that he was talking. For majority of passed, AM was about 50 % or slightly above.
I agree that AM was not extremely difficult, but it’s the time-constraint that made it hard…