Schweser Sample Exam Score

Hi there, Any of you have done Schweser study notes book 6 sample exam? I finished 3 out of 6, it took me way longer than 3 hours for each exam, and the accuracy level is embarassingly low. This is demoralizing. Any of you have an idea how to improve score in a short time? My weak point is in ethics, though I have read the standard book and 5 other schweser study notes, everything still seem to be tricky. Other sections I am just really slow and I always have to refer back to the notes. A lot of details and formulas slipped off my mind. Can anyone tell me how is your study hanging? Thanks

what worries me the most is the persistence of low scores. i do not see any improvement as I proceeded, even though i understood the mistakes each time. How can this happen! There just seem to be infinite amount of holes to fill.

I feel the same way :frowning: Have been scoring in the mid 60s all the time… Any help or support here would be greatly appreciated. Any trick on how to remember the formulas? I was able to complete only 105 and 110 out of 120 in the first 2 practice test I took. Feel so miserable :frowning:

guys, i wouldn’t worry too much about low scores. it’s not about the score itself but what you learn from the exam. from what I heard actual CFA exam is going to be more conceptual, less quantitative and less time-consuming. Don’t be frustrated, continue studying, there are only 3 weeks left. Spend them wisely!

maratikus is right- you still have some time to refine everything. I would say take a look at your practice exams and see what areas you’re really weak on- example- are you consistently getting capitalized vs operating lease questions wrong or do you screw up LIFO/FIFO or the CFO/CFF/CFI questions? If yes, hopefully you have q-bank- go take a 50 question quiz on that one area alone. I would say even include the easy questions, not just advanced, because a lot of times those are the ones with concept questions, not numbers. you should be getting every one of those concept questions right and once you do enough of the numbers problems, they’ll start to look similar in terms of how you want to attack them. ethics- this is an area you want to ace. 1st thing- memorize GIPS. you have 18 ethics q’s a side, most likely 3 or 4 will be GIPS each time- so there are 3 or 4 that you have no excuses on- it’s memorization straight up, nothing else… these are easy win-able points. now for the others- are you able each time to knock out maybe 2 of the answers? i feel like if you’re pretty much understanding ethics, you should at least be able to get it to 2 answers every time. if this happens, try to see why you’re getting answers wrong- write down little stuff like mosaic theory or gifts are this and that but it’s ok to accept a flight or whatever if it’s to see a business facility that’s out of the way for regular airlines, etc… ethics is tricky but if you really do spend the time, it becomes a lot more methodical. read the handbook examples over and over and over some more- have them firmly implanted in your head. besides that- take a look at the areas you consistently score low on and attack. if you’re acing quant, don’t review it anymore to make yourself feel good. go hit econ. or PM. or derivatives/alt investments. but mostly FSA if you are at all weak on anything since this is the biggest chunk of the test. you will improve, but take the time to really, really go over what you got wrong and reinforce with studying and qbank. if you’re not seeing improvement in your scores, then you probably aren’t reviewing your wrong answers/weak areas well enough before taking another test. don’t worry that much about time- the real test you won’t feel that crunch quite as much. as long as you’re w/in 10 or 15 minutes on your schweser exams, you’ll probably be ok on time. don’t ever sit and plug at a problem for 15 minutes. guess and move on. 3 weeks is a ton of time- even 2 hrs a day is another 40 or so hours- a LOT can be learned in that amount of time if you focus on the areas where you really can improve your scores. whatever you do- keep going… don’t let up at all, and learn as many of the concepts as you can, not only the formulas.

Practice implementing the techniques - it’s the best way to remember how to do something. Also, many of them are common sense. I don’t remember the sharpe ratio as (Rp-Rf)/stdev, I remember it as “excess return per unit of risk”. So “excess return” - that’s return over the risk free rate, or (Rp-Rf) - and risk (in this crazy world) is standard deviation. That way you don’t have to memorise the formula, you just remember the concept.

I took 3 exam from the Schweser book 6 1) 68% 2) 66% 3) 65% it is getting lower and lower… I will spend more time on the correction…get more than 70% on FSA, FI and ethics … do pooly on economics and portfolio 19 more days…

shrimp, perhaps rather than rushing to take the next exam, just slow down for a bit and do a good review of the stuff you got wrong. I find that’s a good way to lift scores and feel better about what you know. At the end of the day it’s how much you’ve learned that counts, not what marks you were getting on your practice exams.

Lola, thanks for the advice you are right i will focus on the correction and do the next exam in one week…

thanks a lot for the help. everyone. bannisja, your advice sounds great. Shrimp, I guess it is hard to balance the time between doing practice exams and reviewing, since there is not much time left. One hand, we want to do as much practice as possible, practice makes perfect right? as chris said. The other hand, we want to slow down, and pick up the crumbs we left along the road. I wish I split myself into 2. :frowning:

Thanks a lot guys, really appreciate all your input. Will try to use the strategy and see my performance this weekend in my practice tests. Is there any place where i can get some free practice questions for the exam? I have already spent a lot of money on this exam and I don’t have any cash left. So would really appreciate if any of you could direct me to some free resources or email the question banks if you have them. Once again thanks a lot for your help.

Hi, I’ve been preparing and studying religiously for the past 5-6 months for the CFA Level 1. After taking 3 of the Schweser practice exams, I’m very embarassed to admit that I consistently get scores of 56,57, 55, etc. I’m consistently under where I need to be. I’m ok with ethics but some of the quant methods section is giving me problems. Also, when I go back and check my incorrect answers, I understand where I went wrong…which sort of points to the idea that there is so much information and it’s tough to retain much more than the basic concepts sometimes. Does anyone know whether the Schweser practice exams are designed to be more difficult or more involved than the actual CFA exam? I have taken some “flashback” questions and sample exams posted on the CFA site and the tests are a joke compared to the Schweser exams. Am I imagining this or has anyone else encountered this issue? I’m hoping someone confirms my suspicions; otherwise I’m in some trouble with the test in under 3 weeks and me consistently getting in the mid to high 50s.

lehmetelya, are you talking book 6 exams, or exams from the practice book (what we call book 7 around here)? Exams from the practice book are apparently really tough and you shouldn’t be worried if you’re getting high-50’s on those. re book 6, people who’ve taken the exam already (and I’m not one of them), say that even those are a bit harder and certainly more computational than the real thing. Just keep chugging along and learn as much as you can each day.

Great Advice everyone, I got a pretty low score as well, but I will keep chugging along and following everyone’s advice. Thanks.

I finished all 3 book 6 exams, some 240 question schweser exams and the 1st CFAI sample exam. I scored b/w 67-75% in Book 6, 80-90% in schweser & around 80% in the CFAI. I don’t think book 6 questions are tough per se, but they are very time consuming. I had a hard time finishing them, infact ended up leaving a few questions in most of the exams. This time crunch makes them tough. One thing that helped me was that while doing the exam I rated each question on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = I’ll bet my xbox Iam correct, 5 = wtf). Besides reviewing the incorrect answers, I paid close attention to the ones in the 3-5 range. I made a list of topic wise incorrect & difficulty score per each question. This helped me indentify my weak areas (Ethics, Quant, Econ, PM & Taxes). I am trying to focus on these. So far the results have been decent.

wow delhirocks, you are overprepared and will surely rock the exam with these scores… I have around 1200 qestions left, to be done, from Passmaster (total of 2551), I have not touched Book-6 (Schweser) and never taken any CFAI exam (Planning to take them in the last week). It’s an uphill battle and time crunch to add to the misery… Hope I manage to complete everything in time… - Dinesh S

Yeah delhirocks you’re going to dominate it. No worries.

i have done just the questions at the end of each section from CFA curriculum. however, i had read twice each book and taken my own notes, so far i have 3 notebooks. am planing to take prob 1 or 2 practice exam from CFA website few days ago before the exam. hope this approach works, so far, i feel very comfortable

2007 version Schweser just has 6 books, not 7th book, the book 6 is sample exam. I think sample exams in book 6 are very hard. real CFA exam is definitely easier than them

This is my personal opinion and experience… I passed L1 in June and consistently got between 65-70% on the book 6 exams. The 2nd book 6 test I took was horrible… I scored around 65% and took an hour longer than what is given. On my next exam I circled questions that I did not know right away, made an educated guess and moved on to the next question. I scored much better this way and felt less stressed. I used this “best guess” approach on the actual exam and finished each section with half an hour to spare. I Then used this time to go back and rethink the questions I had circled. I felt less of a time crunch for the actual exam than I did while taking book 6 exams. Like I said this worked for me… might not work for others. All in all do not get down about the book 6 scores and Good Luck Everyone.