I passed last year. I was a retaker. I left one good sized subquestion blank in the am and focused on what I could get right. That paid off when it came to the long calcualtions which arent so bad as long as you arent rushing.
I crushed PM and finished with 1.5 hours to spare and just kept going over my answers. People said last year, if you didnt find the tricks in the PM then you got crushed…didnt turn out that way.
Enjpy your free time…Its definitely all worth it when you get done.
i don’t. not sure if that worries me or my brain is still recovering from beating it up for 7 months. which part of IPS, the private wealth or inst. ? (obvious w/out sharing details of the exam…)
I mean I thought you were referencing those 2 sentences on getting credit for your answer that are probably going to be included in all exams going forward.
I hope I didn’t do too many stupid mistakes. One thing is really bothering me: Was this one AM question when comparing two alternatives about three ADvantages of 1 vs. 2 or three DISadvantages of 1 vs. 2?
Left about 7-10 points blank in the AM. Overall, the morning section didn’t feel too bad in a sense that most of the questions were familiar, although I did find several mistakes right after the exam.
PM was weird. Felt like I was clueless about 80% of the Ethics questions. Going through the rest of the PM felt like a walk in the park until I hit the last couple of sets, that required more complex calculations. Had to guess about 5-7 of those calculations at the end. Was pretty pissed because I did similar ones on the mocks.
I’m still numb from the exam and I don’t remember if I posted my opinion of the exam or not so if this is a double post, I apologize.
I finished the AM with plenty of time. I’m a really fast test taker and a Band 10 retaker. I scored much better on the AM than the PM last year.
That being said, I thought the AM was much more difficult than last year’s AM exam. I didn’t feel like questions were presented the same way that they have been in the past 7+ years’ exams. It really felt like the CFAI made an effort to add another challenging element to the exam. However, I had time to review all of my AM answers and I felt better about my performance after reviewing my answers.
My first pass on the PM felt pretty bad, especially Ethics and AMC. I felt like several Ethics questions were unfair and could have been interpreted differently. Everything else was pretty easy in the afternoon. Once again, finished with plenty of time and felt better about my performance after reviewing all my answers. There were 12 questions in the PM that I wasn’t confident in and could have gone either way for me.
My bold prediction: 65-70% on the AM, 75-80% on the PM. This would be a good 10% lower than my most recent practice exams.
Failed last year, and really studied a lot harder this time around. Completely owned the multiple choice questions because I was very familiar with all those types of questions - they seemed cookie cutter to me. The exception to that is ethics, because I can never be sure with those. In my opinion they come down to semantics and interpretation. AM was ok, got to every question, but wrote too elaborately on the initial few questions. by 10:30 am, I was just finishing question 4, leaving me an hour and a half to do 7 questions. I sped up and mostly finished, but had to leave a couple points blank, but no full questions blank. I would be surprised if I get a fail, but it’s possible.
we’re in the same predicament then: having long duration fixed liabilities which cannot easily be unwound. given the favorable market interest swapping a floater is a possibility, but would likely end up turning the liability into distressed debt and putting alot into VAR. ^^
I did well on the AM, and had about 20 minutes left, just like the other AM mocks I took. I’m pretty sure I missed 16 points on the AM, but actually felt very confident about about all of the other questions and will probably miss another 15 or 20 in partial credit items on things I thought I answered well but didn’t, or had too short of an answer.
PM is a different story. After being asked the ethics questions, I felt as ethical as a FIFA official. Simply had no idea what the answer was to about half of them. Apart from eithics and gips, I felt I scored about a 75%-85% on the rest of the PM.
Every time I’ve done a CFA exam, I’ve felt confident straight afterwards. I then read about the ‘tricks’ on AF and realise I’ve done some questions wrong and got nervous. Both times, I’ve passed with a good score matrix.
So here’s how i’m trying to think about it. I’m going to anchor my score to my mocks. I know I’ve missed a few sneaky things in the exam, but I missed them in the mocks too. While I’ve come out of a mock feeling more confident than I did on the 6th June, this is definately in the top half.
I know that the majority of people overestimate their AM score, so i’ll reduce that by 10%. Even with the 5% drop in overall score, I’m still above 70%, so I’m going to try and relax for the next ~9 weeks.
I’m cautiously optimistic because I was better prepared this time around. I felt as if I did about as well as I could have done - even more time and effort studying wouldn’t have made a big difference at all for me in the exam. No feelings of “damnit, I should know this but I forgot!” unlike last year.
Funny thing about some of the questions. If you know the subject matter, you can do a tiny bit of math to find the “easy” wrong answer and then deduce the rest based upon knowledge of how the numbers work.
For example, and I really am just making this up, say you have answers A through C. If you calculate the “easy” wrong answer as option B, and numerically A
It’s really helpful to not just know the various formulas in LIII, but also how the inputs relate to the outputs.
This isn’t really a shortcut, I suppose, since you have to understand the concepts beyond the formula. I guess what I’m saying is…if you study more it gets easier.