I passed Level 1 and Level 2 first time with 70+ in every area, and I found this the toughest of all three levels, particularly the PM.
I feel like there were a lot of curveballs in the PM. The problem was, that once you’ve seen the curveballs, it’s not like one answer is obvious, it’s just that the “obvious” answer isn’t definitely right.
AM I finished with 30 minutes to go and went and rechecked everything. Confident of getting 75% in AM, and should pass with 60% in the PM, and will probably score above that.
EDIT: one other thing. I think the ethics questions were very hard. I could spend 3 hours looking stuff up now and still not be sure of the answer to one particular question.
To be really honest i think PM was quite easy…i am expecting 50/60…but AM was very bad for me…left an entire question blank …and few subparts…overall i left 25 points on the table…
Left 2 sub questions blank in the AM: one due to time, and the second because I didn’t bother to memorize the equation (still kicking myself for that, it was an easy one too)
PM: Got brutalized by ethics… I always seem to feel like they give you harder questions early, and easier questions later, because I felt my confidence growing after every question AFTER ethics. Other than that, I struggled a bit on the last vignette.
I found the morning tough and was completely thrown by the Individual IPS questions despite that being my strong point going into the exam. The difficulty was that I didn’t have any time to think!! It was literally a case of read and then write and if i paused for a minute or so, all i could think about is the clock ticking down. Personally I think I must have gotten between 55 and 60% in the am, as I crushed the first 5 questions and did ok to poorly on the remaining.
The PM was too easy for my liking. I studied so hard and came out annoyed that no difficult questions came up which would have brought the curve down. The ethics questions were the only ones that threw me off… but I am expecting close to 80% in the PM as it was one of the easiest exam over the 3 levels.
If the MPS is 65% or below then I would hope that would be a pass.
Same here, got completely destabilised by the Individual IPS. That will cost me the exam, and also the fact that 2 other questions were weak areas of mine ( this is just bad luck and poor preparation tough).
It’s really sad because I did well on the PM, and if the AM had been on the same “model” as 2010-2014, I would have passed this exam.
My first time taking Level 3 after completing my Level 2 in 2010 and hopefully the last…
I found the morning session OK, managed to complete all 11 on time, worried a little about the handwritting although tried to be as precise as possible. I would say in total managed to get 75% with 90% confidence. Had another 30 min left to just browse through the questions…
Afternoon was relatively easy, ethics was tricky for me. I d say 75% as well. Had another 30 min left hence left the exam earlier.
AM was tough though not extremely difficult. However bad time management made me to leave a couple questions worth 12 mintutes on the table…PM i crushed it !! Confident of scoring a 90 including Ethics. And yes i did see the small curve balls thrown at by cfai so can be certain i nailed it…overall i pray that PM performance will help me cross the MPS line.
AM was tough for me as well, PM was ok. Hope it is ok to change answers in template by cancelling and circling the other answer. Can someone help on that?
AM was relatively fine, with better time-management all 11 questions seemed doable ( i did 10 and know 3-4 part were partly correct / incrorrect :(). PM seemed very easy initially and I finished the complete set very happily only to realise later there were hidden tricks in there. It initially seemed as if I could just complete everything in an hour, no / straitforward calculations or really objective answers, but we know CFAI
I think, I couldn’t find the tricks for alteast a few of them. nevertheless, the overall exam seemed good. hoping for the best, to pass the Level 3 exam this year
Like most on here I thought the AM was pretty challenging. Of course I made some stupid RTFQ mistakes that took time. Mistakes like calculating way more than was needed in two questions plus other mistakes that I’m sure I missed. So we’ll see.
Felt pretty d**n confident on the PM though. As for the tricks, I found myself catching a lot of stuff that got me in practice exams. I was like “Aha, you got me with this last time, not this time.” I was banking time throughout the test which was very helpful towards the end. I needed and used the full time I had left in the last two item sets and that helped a lot.
Band 7 last year but I took it to another complete level of preparation this year so hope the hard work paid off. We’ll see. Unfortunately won’t know till I get that email.
By the way, I had a quick minute to review my AM paper and funny to see how the handwriting changes as the test moves along. First few questions beautiful handwriting (even better than my usual) and then the hand writing got progressibly more frantic looking. I was booking it there in the end.
I finished the am with 20 secs to spare but i think i did well (so long as they can read my writing).
PM, aside from ethics which i think 5 out of the 12 queestions were debatable, was the easiest exam i have ever took. I had plenty of time so i tried to go back and reconstruct the wrong answer to see where they were derived from. In fact, it was so easy i am worried i missed the so call ‘tricks’. having said that, i prepped my a$$ off so i knew the books inside and out. I hope my hardwork pays off
Yah, AM was def a time crunch. I think this was said before but i bet the graders see a dramatic difference between hand writing at the start vs towards the end. I wish cfa would allow for cpus to take away the chance of missing points on hand writing. My writing is worse than a doctor no matter how slow i write things.
