I wondered about the trick factor as unfortunately I did not catch many this year so knew I must have been missing them. Ugh.
Do you actually believe the ethics adjustment is legit? I always thought it was some sort of conspiracy. I agree that ethics is a crapshoot and is the one area I always neglect. I typically only spend a few hours reviewing it per exam and have always been 50-70 or higher. I think a lot of it is common sense and a lot of times it’s easy to spot the tricks that are being thrown into the question. This year my fully study session for ethics consisted of the hour lunch break between the AM and PM session on Saturday lol(excluding practice problems within mocks), so I guess we’ll see how it turns out.
Every year the board is littered with people griping about the tricks. I think what means “tricks” to some is not the same for others.
Definitely not enough time on am. Finished all questions but had some short ass answers there towards the end.
pm was relatively easy w the exception of ethics. The ethics questions were more ambiguous than ever and totally unreasonable.
overall, I’m optimistic I passed but those ethics questions really threw me for a loop and have me worried.
agree with everything you said.
Guys, do you think the overall candidates feel as you do? I mean i have always though this forum has a high bias toward passing-candidates.
How do other candidates you met yesterday feel?
On the AM I left a whole question blank, so that could be a problem. I felt fairly good about a lot of of my answers, just wondering if I left too much blank. Time management was challenging. There was one question where after I finished answering I realized there was a trick and had to reverse my answer.
PM I feel fairly confident about. Ethics will be the wild cad there. Think it will come down to whether my PM was high enough.
I talked to a couple of people near me and both had left some blanks in the AM
For me… AM was lower on the “trick” part but higher on the “difficulty” part; PM was lower on the “difficulty” part but higher on the “trick” part. Overall, like a lot of you I felt much better about PM compared to AM but that might just be a bias that I thought I knew the answer but really I didn’t.
In my exam hall, a bunch of people started “flooding out” 90 minutes after the exam. I have to say that didn’t make me feel brilliant: 1. It must be so easy but I don’t feel it; 2. It made subtle but significant noises when people are leaving continuously …
I’ve resigned to the fact that I failed this one. Not gonna spend the summer fretting over it. Only hope is that I made some great guesses in the afternoon and did as good as, or better than, i thought i did in the morning
Non native English speakers as a huge disadvantage reading all the vignettes … Speed was a huge factor in the morning and not being a native English speaker takes longer to read and makes the traduction.
AM was tough. I left some questions totally blank (not entire vignette though) and answered with a very short answer to some questions. I felt like it was a joke. Speed was too important and not being able to read as fast as other should not stop you from being a charterholder. However, it seems that the CFA Institute is more testing my ability to answer quickly than my knowledge.
PM was fair excepts Ethics which was clealy difficult to understand for a non native English speakers. I read you guys english speakers finding Ethics hard. Imagine us. It was a joke.
I think that after passing the Level II, the worst was behind me.
I was setting very close to the bathroom with hand dryer noises. Every 2-3 minutes someone was going in the bathroom and that even after 5 minutes the exam began. I can’t believe the CFA Institute accept that. I was hearing noise from the bathroom. It was easy to stop this noise (using paper to dry hand).
I personally found that the AM Individual Weatlh Management section was way different than in the past papers, which caught me on the wrong foot and definitely impacted me.
Globally, confident during the first part of AM, then found it difficult in the middle and finally found better at the end but challenging due to time pressure. PM was straightforward according to me, am just worried to feel it this way, maybe I haven t seen the tricks… I found the last item set challenging though.
Am I the only one that thought PM was harder than AM?
I was able to get through all item sets in about 90 minutes, but spent 90 minutes on 10-15 questions that were a complete toss-up for me. Came out feeling I failed (availability bias, hopefully 
No, semantics. I definitely thought the PM was harder. Hopefully its just the last item set that’s weighing heavy on my mind.
So is that confidence for all of you will mean the MPS should be above 70? Or those who wrote here are the ones who survived ? The AM was ok but I couldn’t finish on time. PM was easy for me except for the last two item sets were little difficult beside the ethics.
Take everything with a grain of salt. My take is that people on this forum do better than an average candidate.
#notsurprised
#hongkong
Oh God…you guys are terrible, my only hope was the PM, but if there were so many tricks in there, then i am a gonner. I could not see any “least” kind of curveballs i think, Ethics was pretty clear to me. I got a good feeling getting out of PM. Though i belive many would get the same feeling.
It all boils down to AM then i guess, which was again a disaster for me. I think, i wrote too much even after so many hrs. of practice (don’t know what hit me). In the end i missed out on 7 points (~22 minutes worth of Qs) due to bad time management.
In 2013, i gave this exam and got Band5 w/o studying much. I felt i fared better then the actual score back then.
Ofcourse compared to that, the exam went better but not as good as the mocks. I have become more conservative now in my score, cos i think i hav messed up in AM a bit (I expect ~30/53 points in AM and 45/60 in PM). So MPS has to be really low in order for me to pass. Since this was my last go, it gives a fucking bad feeling.
That last set was just a killer. To be honest with you, while I wouldn’t give myself good odds of passing this time, I definitely felt the test was beatable and I feel good about how a retake might go.
I’m not giving myself good odds at passing, either. Maybe a 30% chance if I had to put a number on it.