actually i have found it easy. The only thing u have to do its not to rush and dont forget little details.
Thanks for the encouragement.
I thought the first half of the AM section was alright and then once it got to the first equities section it got difficult. PM i thought the whole thing was pretty tough for the most part. Quant i had guessed on probably 4 of the questions.
Yes, it was the Corporate Finance one (not equities), sorry… There was one piece of info that they didnt have that I needed. But seriously, I spent 5-10 mins on that. I felt there were questions where you needed to know the tricks/tips for solving it. I also used Wiley and some areas were just briefly covered without examples. That fked me in Fixed Income and that’s one of my strongest subjects.
It’s 50/50 for me. There were spots during the exam that went smoothly, sprinkled with a question here or there that I was not sure or simply didn’t know. In all, I probably guessed on like 5-8 questions on each of the AM and PM section.
The Mocks exams WERE definitely not representative of the actual exam. Vignettes were shorter, questions more straighforward and if you studied each topic broadly, you would be able to do fine.
I thought the exam was definitely a lot more straightforward than the mocks. I am not saying I passed but I was pretty scared doing the mocks and the actual exam seemed a lot smoother.
Thought the am section was tougher than the pm and I got caught on some questions for some time including the one others noted above ^^^
Also bit concerned about the “tricks” noted by one or two posters as I saw very few!!
And here I was attributing the ‘straightforwardness’ of the exam to my preparation!! 
More than a month to go till w get to know for sure. We all are in for quite a few mood swings till then, I guess… 
Thought the exam was fair overall – it was definitely clearer and more straightforward than the mock. The AM and PM sections were of equal difficulty for me. I found the PM Fixed Income question the easiest of the session while the afternoon FRA and derivatives was tough. I gave away around 6-8 easy points for sure and changed a couple of derivatives answers at the end that may have been a mistake (ran out of time so couldn’t check again). I’m a retaker and feel better than last time (Band 10) but it could go either way. Came out thinking I had passed but not sure now after thinking about silly mistakes.
^^ I agree - I read the particular reading for the PM Fixed Income question twice and it was sufficient to answer most of the questions
I definitely used all 3 hours for each session to the last second. I was able to get through about 55/60 questions with either knowing them or educated guesses in the first two hours, and then spent the final hour trying to find a needle in a haystack on the ones I skipped that I just had no clue on. For one or two questions a lightbulb did finally go off, so I was glad I kept pushing to the last second. In my L1 experience (failed band 10 first, passed second) I finished early on all sessions and left early so this was new for me.
I am definitely in the AM was easier boat. I felt pretty good at lunch to be honest. Then PM rocked me. There was one FRA vignette where I swear to god if I got a 2/6 I would be ecstatic. I educated guessed on the first 3 questions and the last 3 I literally couldn’t even eliminate a choice. Brutal.
One thing that cracked me up in quant - going through the curriculum I came across a certain something that never was quite clear to me, nor did I ever see it calculated out. And each time I reviewed quant I’d see that and go “oh it’s just too vague, they won’t ask anything about that.” Bam. There it was. Hilarious.
When I failed L1 band 10 I thought I shouldn’t even show up. After I passed L1 the second attempt I left the test center thinking I failed again. Every time I graded a L2 mock I was certain it was going to be a miserable score and they ended up being decent. So I’m hoping that trend continues, cause I don’t feel great about Saturday, but maybe I’ll get lucky on a few guesses (Ethics!? jesus…).
One thing I know is I didn’t leave anything on the table. Gave it my best shot. Time to enjoy the summer.
I thought the exam was not as complex as I imagined, however most candidates including myself did not prepare for the simple stuff but more the areas that did not show up. Really doubt I’ve passed as I had to guess a lot, especially the second to last item set which I had never learnt any calculations for. I also made loads of silly mistakes, having gone back home and recalculated what I could remember to only find that was the answer I didn’t pick. Well it’s a learning experience at the end of the day.
Yeah there’s literally no chance I was going back to check any questions from the exam with the material. I couldn’t handle knowing that I for certain got anything wrong. Leave it up to the gods now.
All my CFA books are going to be burned as a sacrifice to R’hllor.
A couple of people in my seating section completed the AM exam in an hour or so. I couldn’t believe it. Personally, I had about 3 minutes to spare in the morning and 15 in the afternoon. I didn’t revise my iniital answers. No point, especially in the afternoon when I was flying by the seat of my pants.
The guy sitting next to me finished both sections in about an hour and a half. He also didn’t use his calculator very much. He was either a genius or guessing for the majority of the exam. For me, I had two minutes to spare in the AM session and used every last second of the PM session. Nearly burnt out my calculator as well.
AM I thought had two hard sections being one portfolio and one vignette on equity
PM had One vignette FRA and one on Fixed income, PM Derivatives was a 50/50 as well…
Ethics i’m completely unsure but didn’t seem too crazy, but you never know with ethics… All in All it was fairly straightforward in terms of wording asking questions liek the mocks
They must have been quessing…
I was scoring 80’s on mocks both cfa and schweser and finished with time .5-.25 hours left… I was stumped on a few sections in both PM and AM, not to scare anyone but there was definite tricks in there that you needed to know the topic thouroughly to catch, otherwise it was a easy miss just because you can see the answer as a choice
I took the exam in midtown manhattan and it seemed that less than 10% of the group left before the 30min mark…on both sections. NO way I think anyone could have finished either section in an hour. I think there are three camps…“Know you passed”, “hope you passed”, and “know you failed”…I think I fall in the camp of “hope I passed”. A lot I knew…and also a lot I didn’t know. Derivatives was a really weak point for me. Scored less than 50 on both quants and derivatives on level I and passed, so “hoping” i can fail two sections here and still pass.
All around a pretty fair exam.
Imagine the entire CFA curriculum as a piece of white paper. I can say I was prepared for a lot of the center of the paper, but not so much the corners, which is where I felt a good handful (6 or 7) of questions seemed to be coming from.
There was one in particular where I remembered the word I didn’t recognize and when I looked it up in the CFAI curriculum after the exam it was literally mentioned once.
I am not really sure how testing one idea mentioned once in the curriculum (and not at all in Schweser) is supposed to help me in my career as an analyst.
I’m a retaker and I thought this exam was simlar to last year in terms of difficulty. I knew more this year than last year so I found myself guessing less. With that said I still had to make educated guesses on some questions. I thought this year was a bit easier in terms of nobody should have been surprised by the topic weights that we got whereas last year I got burned on portfolio management. Last year I got band 9 and based on how much more I thought I knew this year I think I got a pass.
I found AM and PM to be pretty much the same in terms of difficulty. I had trouble on derivatives but was prepared for the afternoon item set. For fixed income I felt well prepared, even the PM fixed income I thought Elan did a good job in covering it all and I understood it.
Overall if I don’t pass this time I don’t know what more I could do. Studying more wouldn’t have helped because there are questions on there that you can’t expect or prepare for so if I have to do this exam a third time I’m not sure what more I could do.
This was my second time to take the test. I thought this exam was difficult but a little more manageable than last year’s test. That’s probably because I was better prepared this time. I think that the questions were 50/50 between straightforward and subtle/tricky. AM was extremely tough relative to PM, but it took me longer to complete PM.
There were around 2 areas that I had no idea at all what was being asked. I used Schweser for 90% of my study material. I’m not sure if the material was not covered in Schweser, or if it was covered but presented in a very different way in the exam vs. its presentation in Schweser.
I feel that I scored somewhere in the mid-60s, so it’s going to be very close. Hope the MPS is low this year.