Hey All, I have taken a full Schweser practice test this weekend (1/2 on Friday and 1/2 yesterday), and it seems to me that the questions on the afternoon session were a lot harder than on the AM part. There were a lot of problems I didn’t even know where to begin w/ the calculations, and when I looked up the answer after the test ( I just guessed at the answers on those btw), it was like this really long drawn out 4 or 5 step process, or a really long explaination on a trick question. Did you all find the PM part of the practice exams hard? I scored like a 52% on the second part and a 69% on the first one. Another thing I’ve noticed is the Q-Bank questions are much more straight forward (for the most part). I usually score between 70-80% on those (I’ve taken like 15 total exams w/ probably an average of 80 Q a piece). When I miss a question from the Q-Bank, and look at the answer I’m like “oh yeah i see why I missed that”, but on the Schweser practice exams, it’s like they’re almost ALL trick questions. I’m just wondering everybody’s thoughts b/c I’m worried about the real exam now.
That’s like the real exam… June exam this year…first half wasn’t too bad…afternoon session was tough. Warrenb1
Those questions are designed to help you learn the material. That’s why there are a lot of calculation questions and “least likely” questions that have 3 right answers for a concept. I’ve learned a ton even though I agree the questions are probably harder in aggregate.
What were some of the things that you didn’t know how to do the calculations for?
It wasn’t always that I didn’t know how to calculate, just what to calculate. Like a problem would have like 5 steps in one question, or be worded weirdly where you’re not quite sure what it’s asking. Like below. This is a simple one… In three years, you make the first of eight $1k payments and it earns 5% for the first 4 years, and then 4% for the next 3 years. Do they want you to start three years from now? If so, what’s the rate in that time period? Or they give you a paragraph of information with all kinds of things going on, such as a stock at this price and a dividend paid at that price, then sells for this price, and a dividend was paid at that price. Then, in the answers it’ll say “which of the following is least likely correct”. And the choices may be about HPR, Safety first, Standard Deviation, etc…So you have to do 4 calcuations to see which answer is WRONG b/c you have to choose which is least likely correct. Another example would be they give you all this information about a company, and then in the answers it will say if management were to lease instead of expense, would cash flows in the first month be 1234, would cash flows be 5678, the least period be greater 75% of it’s useful life, etc. So again, you have to do basically 4 calculations to figure out the answer. Alot of the questions were like that in Quant and FSA.