It will be interesting to find out how many of you that are saying it was “easy” actually pass. I do believe the morning session was manageable while the afternoon was a rude kick to nutts. One thing is for sure, I definitely know what to expect going forward and It’s not something to underestimate or take lightly.
I guess that depends on whether we’re dealing with an unbiased estimator.
A full glass of whisky with soda , and a couple of cigarettes while you’re finishing the glass. Once you do that , you won’t feel worried even if the mafia was on you , let alone cfa level 1 
I think that the Ethics section was very similar to the CFA Mocks and pretty easy if you did all the mocks and practice, the AM was easy IMO and the PM was medium-hard. total guess maybe 3-4. was left with about 1 hour in each session. I expect a pass
Stress the whisky (Aberlour A’bunadh is a good start), go light on the soda.
Gross.
I’m surprised so many of you felt it was easier than expected. I failed band 10 in June after studying for about 2 months and felt much better prepared this time, but came out of the test not feeling confident at all. I thought the morning session was much harder than the afternoon (which may be partly related to a crappy night of sleep).
I have said all along if I fail level 1 twice I’m done with the program so feeling discouraged and not sure what to do. If I had to guess I’d say I have 50/50 odds of passing. Not sure what to do now but like everyone else I wish I didn’t have to wait ~6 weeks to know the result. One thing is for sure, in the event that I did pass I need to take the studying a whole lot more seriously than I have to date.
Anyway best of luck to everyone who took the test last weekend.
I’m with you man…I felt horrible coming out of that exam. Very tough. Unfortunately I underestimated the test, and only studied for 1.5 months. Now I know better.
in the fail/pass rate did they count people who didn’t show up ?
MikeMorin - they don’t count people who don’t show up in the pass/fail rate. So the pass/fail rate is a true representation of only those who took the test.
Well, dont know what to say about the exam but i think its fair…Anyways, goodluck to everyone
Cheers!!!
So many of yall mentioned the morning paper was easy and the afternoon harder.
I felt the morning paper was brutal. Killed me. Afternoon paper was quite smooth.
I have also found the morning exam was a way easier than the afternoon exam. I think I had around 180 questions that I felt confident, 7~10 questions in total that I had no clue at all, and other 40 questions which I narrowed it down to two. I’m still worried that I lose some questions out of 180 questions that I felt good about… Can anyone please give me advice whether I should start studying for level 2 considering my circumstances? Thanks guyssss
I think we can all agree that one of the sessions was much easier than the other, but given that most people are not in consensus about which one, I would wager that the AM session in one test centre is the PM session in another.
I started studying in mid-september and I completed 3 shweser mocks and a few CFAI mocks as preparation. I also have an accounting background so it was slighly easier than learning everything from scratch. My scores averaged the low to mid 70’s over all of them.
I felt that my morning session was harder, mainly in regards to the ethics session which is normally a very strong part for me. The ethics questions in my AM paper were much shorter in length than the second session and I felt were different to any of the mocks I had taken.
The afternoon session was an absolute breeze and I thought it was much easier than any mock I had attempted.
Overall I found this to be a much easier paper than expected but I still made a few silly mistakes which I am still kicking myself for. I’m pretty worried that because it was such an easy exam that the MPS is going to be raised accordingly.
I completely agree with you, probably because we’re in the same boat… I didn’t pass the June exam in band 9, and I also felt the morning session was more difficult than the afternoon session. Though to be sure whether or not I passed at this point, but I feel more confident than last time, so hopefully I did pass this time.
Best of luck to you as well.
I think we all made a few very silly mistakes we would not have made otherwise. Considering the stress levels, and the 240 questions, it is impossible to get everything right.
Regarding the “the exam was so easy” statement, I have to go against it. I still believe most people have failed, and most of the people feeling really confident about the exam have too. The pass rate will be 35% as usual and the MPS will be around 70% as usual. There is no reason that this year 70% of the exam takers will pass or that they raise the MPS to 80% or something. I thought the exam was trickier than anything I’ve taken before (7 mocks), and the regular test taker probably got tricked in thinking he nailed it.
it will certainly be interesting if we can bump this in late january when the marks come in. either analyst forum is chalk-full of much better candidates than the average random sample, or as noted, the simplicity of the question structure (ie. less detail-oriented in my opinion than the mocks) led many people to believe they had an easy go at it, but in reality did worse than they thought. hopefully everyone comes back so we can match our post exam reviews to our actual marks (myself included) lol.
Thought the AM was okay, but the PM destroyed me. Did the front to back section both times. Worked in my favor on AM, PM I got stuck early and had about 1:15 to do 70 questions. I walked away thinking either I got in the zone and hammered questions out super fast or I got stuck in every trap.
If there is a next time, I’m going to my strong sections first. What’s done is done 
I actually didn’t see a big difference between AM & PM sessions. However i usually scored around 85 on the mocks (1 cfai & 3 schweser) and i did find the real one much more detailed than the latter. There was no intuition either you knew or you didn’t. At least this is my feeling.
