So I am starting to think of strategic ways to approach the exam on dec. 1. Which makes more sense: immediately tackling the FSA and Ethics section first since it seems to be the “make or break” sections, then move on to the other sections, or maybe just work straight through the exam. Any comments?
That brings up another question. Are the questions grouped into obvious categories such as ethics, FSA, econ? Ie, are the first 24 questions only ethics and so on, or are the questions randomly distributed throughout the 120 in each session?
they are grouped.
Another idea…would it be wise to spend a maybe 2-5 minutes to write down every single formula you remember in the beginning so that you can refer back to them later on? After a couple hours your brain may become fried and you may start to question the formulas you thought you knew so well…
I think writing down all of the formulas would probably be a waste of time. There are so many and only a fraction will be tested. From what I understand the test is less quantative than we would expect, anyhow. If you have one or two that you’re really worried about then go for it but otherwise I wouldn’t bother. My plan is to hit up ethics, FSA and asset valuation while my mind is relatively fresh. This is mostly because of the heavy weighting in these topics but also because I have the highest confidence in these areas. Then I’ll go back to econ and quant, both of which are pretty small in importance and I feel like I’ll get the least value out of these two areas. If I run out of time and need to guess I’d rather do so on a weaker section. Silly question, but what do the answer sheets look like? In practice exams I wait until the end to fill in my answers on the bubble sheets, which is great if you skip around so nothing gets missed, but this takes me a good amount of time & I will have to plan on leaving maybe 15 minutes or so to make sure I fill them all in.
hey man, questions are grouped according to topic…ethics could be the first 20 questions, followed by quant maybe 15 etc etc aint it interesting?
May be beginning with the most formular intensive section works better than taking time to write down all formulars.
be careful, not to mess up the answer order though, since in the exam you will be having a seperate sheet to cicle the answer. I will prob just follow the same order as how i do the practice exam, since that is the way i am used to.
I don’t think there’s one single approach that works for all. That’s what the next 2.5 weeks are for - to figure out what works for YOU, finetune your strategy and keep doing whatever works all the way through the exam.
i am going from 1 straight to 120… and then again in the afternoon… b/c i do not want to mess up the order of anything… i have done that 4 times already on the pratice q’s and have decided that i do not need any more risk… 4 points wasted…
from experience – I have seen that the actual bubble answer paper that they provide you has much smaller, oval bubbles with the entire set of 120 bubbles spread across about a 4 (inch) wide strip across. which is different from the bigger round answer sheets most books provide. also be prepared to write your entire name on top in Scantron. As regards someone’s comment of marking answers 1-120 at the end, it might not be a good idea for two reasons: 1. During Answer transfer you could end up making mistakes. 2. Time pressure could cause mistakes at the end. 3. When they say “drop pencil” you are supposed to, otherwise they just “trash” your answer paper… (this is also present in the CFA designation Ethics section). So better not to take a chance. I was never under any kind of time pressure in the exam in June. Time is not an issue, in terms of being able to do due diligence on each question, come back later to solve the ones you are not so confident about, etc. etc. also gives you enough to move across sections. only you must take care to transfer the answer to the question you just solved… CP
I didn’t think the exam was grouped according to sections. Your questions can be ethics-FSA-Econ-Ethics.
Definitely exam is grouped by sections… Shhhh… don’t get them started…