I remember getting Band 10 last year and seeing all the excited people on the forum talk about how thrilled they were with their scores. It was really painful for me, but I appreciated a retaker who passed taking the time to write a post giving some insight on what he did differently the second time around. As a retaker who passed this year, I want to do the same. Things I did differently in 2010: 1. Get serious about ethics: In addition to sporadic questions during my studiing, I devoted two full days the last week before the exam on anything and everything CFAI-ethics related. This included the CFAI text, the questions in the text, and redoing all the ethics vignettes from mocks and samples. 2. End of Chapter Questions: I did this about 2-3 weeks before the exam, and it took me about 2-3 weeks to do. Very very helpful. While doing the questions, I could see questions that I remembered from the previous year’s exam that I failed. The content, language, and difficulty level are very similar to the real thing. 3. Through NYSSA, I got set up with a free study group with people in my area. We met once a week for 2 hours. It’s hard to say what tangible results this gave me, but at the very least it was nice to discuss other parts of the curriculum with people since you forget about them when you are doing your self study and are so involved in just the topics you are at that time covering. 4. I also bought the Schweser Video CDs but didn’t have time to even crack them open. I think it would have helped for weak areas, so if you have time to do this it’s worth a shot. If you failed, forget it, start over in the winter and kill it next year. You can probably find more detailed “I passed and this is what I did posts” if you do a search from last year. The exam scores were results August 18th, 2009 last year. Good luck.
I failed with scoring band 7. I am pretty good at benchmarking where I will score and had predicted that’s what I would get. I think the problem is that I just didn’t come close to doing enough practice problems. When I took L1 (passed in December) I did probably 1300 practice problems by completing all the Schweser exams, taking the CFA mock and doing all the samples. Taking the same approach I would have needed to do roughly 650 practice problems for L2, or more since it’s supposed to be a harder test, but I think the most I did total was probably around 300. Another problem I had is that I really rushed to get through the material. I wanted to get done with the material in two months so that I could spend the last two months doing practice problems. When it came time to do them I realized that I hadn’t learned much at all when rushing through the material. I lost all my confidence and wasted 3 weeks only lightly studying before getting convinced to make a final push. The final push was no good. This time around I’ll take more time to read each of the books, really try to understand the material as I’m taking the practice exams and do a lot more review. The accounting section killed me on this exam. I’ll probably start up again in September or October, then take a break in the winter before studying harder in the spring. I’m getting married next summer so I need to start early to make sure that stuff doesn’t come up and throw me off track before the test next year.