PM was harder than 2015. I can count 2 qstns that I got wrong (one is the last PM question - if you all can remember it)… about 8qstns (50/50) and of course, the subjective Ethics… so 10 minus probably 4 in Ethics… I dont know, I just dont know…
AM was as good as it can get…
I also made this mistake on the first occurance of this answer format, and drew arrows instead of erasing and redoing the question in an alternate order.
The AM obviously took longer to write, but I didn’t really feel its material was any harder than PM. It always feels like the multiple choice questions are designed to be “clever” since there are only three answers to choose from. The written questions were more straightforward - the difficulty was a consequence of actually needing to know and describe the concept without hints.
Yes. You can’t really use statements from people on this board as representative of the true population because people posting on this board are more likely “in” to the exam and probably spent more time studying for it. Also, if you felt iffy on the AM but great on the PM section you’re going to have more overconfidence in how you did because you’re hoping that the PM made up for the AM. That’s how I felt last year and I was a band 8 fail. Last year during lunch I felt totally defeated, didn’t even cram anything extra over lunch because I thought it was a lost cause. Then I took the PM section and thought I did so well I may have made up for the horrible AM performance. Last year I was on these boards thinking I either made it, or just missed. Turns out I missed by a lot more than I expected.
I think I may not have written my answers in the correct row on those questions, but I did explicitly state which option I was referring to at the start of each answer. I’m assuming that I lost points because of that (unless the marker gives points for the right answer in the wrong row, which I doubt).
I managed my time well during the AM session, went for those questions that required the least time first. Yet, to be honest, there was 1 set of question that knocked me out. I had no clue how to approach it and wrote whatever I had in mind. I used abbreviations whenever I could, folded some pages so that I could look at the questions and answer boxes at the same time. OK, now that I’ve come to think about it … Are we allowed to fold pages in the exam booklet … T_______________T
PM session was ok, too bad I had enough time to change some of my correct answers to incorrect … Still beating myself up about it. What a shame …
+1
“the difficulty was a consequence of actually needing to know and describe the concept without hints.”…you made a very good point.
Overall, i think the institute wanted to change some recurring themes:
do last 5 year exams, EoCs and that shall suffice sort of emerging theme. They changed that. This exam would have suited the people who read books properly rather than practice oriented prep. As you said, candidates who could write without hints.
questions like justification for why not B or C…than usual format of why A was something new. Not out of the box, but its likely that a few people would have misread that.
And as a retaker, i wont even compare this year’s PM vs last year. This year PM was a different ball game altogether. Last year PM was like if you have read the topic you have it. This time, atleast 10 questions were from depth of the topics and from kind of LOSs schweser question bank hardly had 1-3 questions each.
I prepared using schweser last time and scored 70+ in 8/10 case studies, 50-70 in one and under 50 in the last (gips, i didnt even read a page). I failed band 10 because of AM, so i worked hard on that this time. And did the same level of prep for PM (thinking why fix it if it aint broken). I did well in AM this time but i found PM hard (certainly not 45-50/60 type one)
That leaves me with a very narrow margin of error for AM and ethics.
+1 @KSTHANE
I do agree there’s a negativism bias. Some PM Qs were tricky but lots of low-hanging fruit to grab if you had studied properly. I think both cancel out. If you got say 90% on the easy stuff and managed 50% in the trickier ones, you’re still at 70% for a good section of the PM exam. Now of course if you did considerably bad on AM that might prove insufficient.
But don’t forget: the majority of AFers will pass the exam. If you studied well, attended this forum and did good in mocks and prior year AMs, my sense is that there wasn’t anything sooo much different about the 2016 exam to imply that you should still fail. Prior years and the mocks had their own tricks too…have trust in the Bayesian base rates!
Did you do previous years AM exams for practice? Did you time yourself during those practices?
During practice, I definitely had results similar to leaving 33 points blank. I had to really change my test taking strategy (i.e. satisfice a lot) to be able to finish on time. AM section pacing is super hectic.
I would not worry about blank ones as long as the others are correct. I have seen a lot of people who finished and didn’t get marks for what was finished. Also one of the top graders stated that they only grade what is correct. So partial points are hard to get…
really sympathize with this – Between reading the questions and divining answers there’s not much time to dick around on the AM. Shocked that some on this board finished with 20 minutes to spare. Talk about overachievers.
Agree with this. I thought AM was very tricky in some aspects, they asked questions on topics in a way that I had never seen before. Tested easier concepts, but in a tough manner, if that makes sense. I struggled with time, which surprised me. FInished maybe 10 mins early and had a bit oftime to review. I just left one 3 minute question blank as it was a term I had never heard of before and had no clue what to put.
AM surprised me a bit, it was harder than I expected. PM was right about in line with what I expected. The 2nd Ethics itemset I thought was very hard. Almost everything else I thought I knew, or at least had a very good guess on, I think there was only one question where I just totally guessed A B or C. PM I think I was done in about 80 minutes. Took a little 10 minute break then went back and checked every single question and found a few mistakes I had made.
It already existed. See example 2008 QB and 2008QC 
I felt that there was one question in the very middle of the AM exam that was very difficult, and I got it wrong. Overall, I thought the AM was on par with previous years. I finished in an hour and a half.
Overall, I agree with the sentiment that AM is damage control and PM is where you need to do well.
I started in September and I did a lot of MOCK EXAMS(9-10), and I did every AM paper going back to 2011 twice while having study partners grade it. Mock exams is where it is at. Felt very prepared.
First time post here - figured I’d join the discussion having written L3 for the first time. Misery loves company I guess.
Broadly speaking, my assessment was that I felt better on the AM than the PM which was something I wasn’t expecting given all the horror stories I’ve read pertaining to the morning section.
I freaked out after seeing the first question in the AM and frantically tried to find low hanging fruit just to build some confidence/momentum. Fortunately, I finished all the questions with about 2 minutes to spare. There were 4 questions I’m pretty sure I nailed (>70) so I’m hoping that I got between 50-70 for the rest. Really wanted to avoid any sub 50s so hopefully partial marks will get me to somewhere between a 55-65% in the AM.
PM was nasty for me. I probably answered ~50% of the MC questions with a high degree of confidence, 30% with reasonable confidence and 20% that I really struggled on. I agree with some of the prior posts regarding the wording of certain questions.
As background, I started studying in mid-April and was able to get an entire week off leading up to the exam. I did all the topic tests on the CFAI website twice, went through all the prior CFAI AM exams back until 2005 (under exam conditions) and relied mainly on Schweser (though I did reference the actual CFAI textbooks whenever I needed to delve deeper into the material). In total, I think I logged in between 250-300hours?
All in all, I think it’ll be a slim pass or fail for me - hoping for the former…could always be the latter. Oh the humanity.
AM was real bad for me - I left half an itemset blank because of time and went into damage limitation mode hopefully no more than 4 below 50%.
PM - easy and a few tricks but the fact that everyone here has said that makes me think that they haven’t actually tripped anyone up.
All in all, I reckon a band 10 fail / scrape a pass…borderline.
You passed it for sure.
AM - i left a few sub questions blank in AM but feel like the ones I answered were correct… (maybe something like 75% of 90%) PM -the first two item sets were demoralizing… I knew the guesses I made were wrong but every choice looked right! It felt good getting some of the difficult calculations correct and seeing the answer there as a choice but I’m just not very good at the concept questions… likely very similar to my average mock scores around 65% overall enough easy points in both AM and PM to make up for the tricky questions and very fair exam… time management in AM is very important… I’m sure I could get 100% if I had 5 hours… I think I passed because my belief is that the MPS is overestimated and possibly near 60%/high 50s… I actually feel better than when i passed level 1 and 2 which surprised me each time.
Same, I am sure we passed. We did it!
^very optimistic
But it feels good to be optimistic…
That’s exactly how I feel. Time management is everything.And there were some traps which you might overlook in a rush.