Hi, I am reading ethics, session 1. Some sample questions are very lengthy and taking lot of time to read and understand. Can any one of you, who wrote the recent level 1 exam, comment on your opinion on such questions and how can we handle them with in the time we have? Also how many such questions we see usually?
One short sentence to 2 paragraphs. Most of the questions will be rather short in nature.
the ethics questions are usually vignettes about 6 to 8 lines on a standard a4 80 column page. CP
in both AM and PM sessions the first 18 questions are Ethics/GIPS - mostly Ethics. generally one or two paragraphs per question. Some run to half a page of text. Often involve two situations - eg a story about Smith and Jones - and might be a two-part question - ie whether Smith violates and/or whether Jones violates - so you have to get both parts right for a correct answer. The format changes from time time - the best guide is the practice exams on CFA site closer to the exam. On the time issue - you have 90 seconds to answer each question over the whole exam. Despite the word length, Ethics questions are generally where you can make up time. Notionally the 18 ethics questions take up the first 27 minutes of each session. On average the question might take say 30 seconds to read and then another 10-20 seconds to think about and answer - at the most. You could aim to complete in say 15 minutes. They are not the sort of questions you ponder about and re-think or re-calculate. You either know it or not, as soon as you read the facts in the question. One good way to prepare is to do hundreds of practice questions - with a stop watch, and/or the timed tests on-line (CFA + Schweser, etc). Hope this helps.
Thanks everyone, your comments are great help!
Thanks null&nuller. I think your post has been a great help to us.
Hi, how about the relativeness in difficulty of schweser conecept checker & the cfa end reading problem in ethics? tnx!
alix12, without doubt (imho) the best guide to difficulty & format are the CFA on-line exams - they are available a few weeks prior to exam. Also the CFA reading problems are very relevant - cuz it’s CFA material straight from the source. From memory the Schweser tests were good practice, plus in Schweser qbank you can select level of diffuculty - easy/medium/hard. Go for hard if you are making up your own practice exams from qbank. I found the Boston society exams very representative of the actual exam. Your local CFA society can probably give you (or sell cheaply - say $20 or something) past years Boston exams, plus I would recommend signing up for the Boston practice exam (2 weeks before CFA exam) - good practice for questions, time pressure, level of difficulty. good luck!
Many thanks for the inputs null&nuller! =)
read the answers first, especially the 2 parters, to figure out what they are asking, before you read the paragraphs. This will keep you from having to reread every one of them.
I attended L1 in December 2007 and personnally found that most of the questions where you had to calculate were easier than in the Schweser practice exams. But there was a good deal of questions on the course which you might have jumped over during your review and I didn’t expect that. There was also a lot of questions such as : Prop_1 Prop_2 A. Yes No B. No Yes C. No No D. Yes Yes and of course, Prop_1 was easy but not 2