I’m venting because I’m annoyed with the ranges CFAI gives for the various topics. w/ L1, you had a much better idea what areas to focus on. This time around: 5-15%??? Comon you have to be kidding me.
yeah pretty much they could have said just ‘learn it all’ instead, which is basically what we have to do.
Agreed with previous poster. That’s just CFAI’s way to inform us we need to “learn it all”.
Learn them all is correct… i just assume them all to be in the middle of their ranges… so 5-15 = 10 to me… that way i can only miss by so many standard deviations one way or another
I’m not so upset with the weightings as I am knowing I read a 200pg section that will have at most 12 multiple choice questions relating to it.
hahaha I b*tched about this to my coworkers like a 2 months ago (of course they just nodded along b/c they have no idea what this test is like). I think the assuming 10% for a 5-15% range is a good strategy… thats what I’ll do when I allocate time to my cramming sessions. Thanks for the idea.
This instutute is a joke and should be banished… I really don’t know why am I taking this exam.
FYI, I collected these last year and it was pretty helpful. Not to say that they can’t change things up for this year but they’ve actually been quite consistent in exam topic weightings over the years. Obviously some adjustments have to be made because of the new alternative asset/corp finance sections but I wouldn’t expect to see anything too different from this in June. FSA (if you add back corp fin), equity, fixed income, derivatives, and ethics have been the same number of questions each of the last four years. 2008: Alternative Investments 18 Corporate Finance 36 Derivatives 36 Economics 18 Equity Investments 72 Ethical & Professional Standards 36 Financial Statement Analysis 72 Fixed Income Investments 36 Portfolio Management 18 Quantitative Methods 18 2007: - Derivatives 36 - Economics 18 - Equity Analysis 72 - Ethical & Professional Stnds. 36 - Financial Statement Analysis 108 - Fixed Income Analysis 36 - General Portfolio Management 36 - Quantitative Analysis 18 2006: - Derivatives 36 - Economics 18 - Equity Analysis 72 - Ethical & Professional Stnds. 36 - Financial Statement Analysis 108 - Fixed Income Analysis 36 - General Portfolio Management 18 - Quantitative Analysis 36 2005: - Derivatives 36 - Economics 18 - Equity Analysis 72 - Ethical & Professional Stnds. 36 - Financial Statement Analysis 108 - Fixed Income Analysis 36 - General Portfolio Management 36 - Quantitative Analysis 18
Good one Aimee, thanks. That derivatives number scares me though… anyone do the CFA end of chapter problems for reading 63? I tried on Saturday, got through like 5 questions over SEVERAL HOURS, and the got so frustrated I wanted to stab my eyes out with my mechanical pencil and then eat my calculator. Swap contract valuation is just so mind-numbingly tedious.
Really stupid question, but I dont get why its Derivateives 36, Econ 18, etc… These can’t be the number of problems or %'s, so what are they? Also where did you gather this info from? Thx.
its out of 360 360 minutes in the exams
philip.platt Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > its out of 360 > > 360 minutes in the exams Where does this data come from then?
It is the number of points per topic. Each question is worth 3 points. So Quant being worth 18 points would be 6 questions, or one vignette
from past postings of people’s passing / failing scores.
^ What CPK said. As far as the point totals, 18 points equals one item set.
History confirms that there will be only 1 item set on PM, Quant and Econ (exceptions are there:)
I wish we could hear them in the board meeting when discussing the breakouts. “Yeah, lets f*ck those L2 2006 candidates up on Quant this year and make it 10%”
Well, it seems that before they had an extra item set to play with, so they either added it to quant or PM. Now we have alternative assets as its own section, so they can’t bump up the weighting to quant/econ/PM without taking away from another section. Obviously you really have to know your stuff in all of these sections but I would be really surprised to see a change of +/- one item set in any of these topics.
It should be more like Equities + AI = 5 FSA = 4 Ethics = 2 FI+Der+CF =2 each PM + Quant + Econ = 1 each but nothing is for sure with CFAI
But look at the bright side, CFAI already told us there will be exactly two vignettes on the exam (10% of 20 vignettes is 2 vignettes). So the topic weights are far from uncertain, but I do agree the deviation are a bit too much on the other topics. In theory they could give an exam that focus on all the minor 5-15% topics (like alternate investment, FI, derivatives) and just barely touch the “Big 3” (Ethics, FSA, Equity) to throw people off. That’s one aspect I don’t like about the exam’s weightings.