Two Useful Tips From Kaplan 3-Day Review from this past weekend

Hi Guys,

I’m not sure everyone has the chance to take the three day Kaplan course, but to be fair I though I’d share some of the useful test tips the instructor pointed out. He’s been invovled with the CFAI and Schweser for ten years now and does a lot of research.

1)He mentioned in the past the passing score has been as low as 61%. So essentially if you can get 4/6 in each item set you should pass.

2)The CFA exam goes in order, so the answer to question 1 will be in the start of the a passage and so on. In the Kaplan tests this will not be the case.

Hopefully this gives everyone a bit clearer of a goal. Best of luck to everyone.

I certainly appreciate your feedback/sharing this experience – however – don’t you feel like you are playing with Fire if you follow the assumption that 4/6 will be passing?

Hard to argue w/ 10 years of experience and a Charter while I’m sitting here struggling with remembering study session 6 from 16 – BUT being comfortable with 4 outta 6 seems dangerous in my opinion when you have such a high rate of people who fail to pass the exam. Whatever the case I sure hope you are right!

I will be there for SF this weekend, good to hear though. These Mock scores are intimidating, I got 58% AM 61% PM on Mock 1 and 63% AM and 62% on PM Mock 2 for Schweser.

I would be careful with being ok getting 4/6, maybe use that as a minimum on subjects you struggle with. I am afriad to leave holes in my knowledge base, I don’t want to run in to any torpedoes on the actual exam. For example I forgot part of the H-model on Schweser Mock 2 AM and I literally had to stop, drive home (from my dad’s office), and continue at home. Wasting half a vacation day in the process.

How did you feel about the whole seminar? Any heads up for me preparation wise?

As the post reads 4/6 can lead to passing but is obviously the minimum. I think though that given the difficultly of the Kaplan exams vs. the CFAI format people should not be discouraged if they are in that area. Obviously a 66% on anything in life isn’t very good, but any tidbit that can help others keep a level head when they are reviewing I think is helpful.

In terms of the review class I purposely scheduled mine a few days after I finished reading (I read the CFAI books), as a means to set up the “final push.” What I got out of the seminar were a few tricks for material, but more so what to focus on which I think is extremely important. As we all know its one thing to study hard but its another to study smart.