Hi everyone, I hope everyone is well and your studies are coming along!
I was wondering what kind of scores you gotta be getting on CFA and Schweser mocks in order to pass the real level 2 exam?
100
Pay no mind to this guy - mid to high 80s and you should be good on June 1.
If you’re consistently above 80 from my understanding it should be smooth sailing (won’t be a hard test for you at all). But I hear that over 70% on the mocks and you’ll be fine. I think the actual MPS is around 65% based upon the 300 hours blog analysis, but no one knows for sure.
In all honesty, I’ve heard whispers that the MPS is in the low 60s for L2 some years and some have ventured as far as to say it’s been estimated in the high 50s on occasion. My plan (and I suggest you consider a similar one) is to target 70 on a consistent basis when I start my practice exam phase this weekend. Obviously higher is better.
Edit: and one of these “low 60s and occasionally high 50s” comments was from an instructor.
80%s and I would be happy as hell…my guess is I’ll be hitting high 60s, maybe a mid-70%…whatever it is I’m going to keep pressing until the exam so I can say I at least tried.
I was scoring around 70% on schweser mocks and 75% on the CFAI mock last year and still failed with a band 9 last year.
gulp… were the mocks a good representation of the exam? They were for L1, is it the same for L2.
Feelings of panic just went up a level.
no schweser exams weren’t very representative. The BSAS exams gave me a good feel of the real thing.
I’ve hardly touched schweser in my preparation this year. They word their questions much differently to the real thing. In the real thing you really gotta know your stuff because they have so many tricks embedded in the exam.
Uh oh. Did you actually have trouble with the concepts tested or was it just a bad exam day? What are you doing differently to prep this time around?
my failure I believe came down to using schweser and having a bad exam day. I mean I did do around 7 mock exams or more.
Because schweser has their readings structured by LOS I only read what was under these LOS’s and none of the other fluff in the CFA books. Also if the LOS didn’t say to calculate I didn’t bother learning how to do the computation. These were two bad oversights for me. This is why I laugh when people come on this board and say “I’m leaving X out there is no way that they can ask that”. They really can ask anything. Things like Yardeni model and other stuff I hadn’t ever seen in Schweser. They might be small but can be asked.
This time around I have made sure to have 2 months of doing mock exams and questions. I think why people fail is because they don’t do enough questions. I have solely relied on CFA books this time around and will use Finquiz and BSAS questions. I’ve nearly finished 2 reviews of the material and will start mock exams around mid next week.
I wish I had the same advise from retakers last year. I probably wouldn’t be here now.
I probably put in 500-600 hours for lvl 2 and came off a 70+ in everything in Level 1. So i was pretty confident walking in last year. Just don’t get complacent.
Good Luck to everyone in their preparation. I hope I get through this year, its not nice to fail thing thing especially when you sacrifice so much and put heaps of work in.
^thanks for the advice - quite useful. I guess I should set a hard deadline after which no more reading notes/watching videos, and ready or not, dive straight into mocks/practice ?'s…would just hate to score low b/c I didn’t spend time doing a thorough review…we shall see.
Shiiiiiiiit - any confidence I had (and it wasn’t much) is now gone…this is discouraging.
I was scoring in the 60s and 70s on the schweser mocks and I agree with trogulj’s overall post. Schweser leaves a lot of stuff out. If you get a vignette on stuff that they have not covered, you’re toast.
Just as an example, when I was studying PM last year, the curriculum had so much on when to add an asset to a portfolio, FMCAR, active risk, active return, performance attribution and analysis. Almost none of it was in Schweser. If any of that had shown up, it wouldn’t have been pleasant. I ended up failing anyway, but have learned my lesson.
Also, at Level II it is very important to understand and really know the material. You can do 5,000 questions but from my experience, the CFAI’s style is very very VERY different from anything I have seen so far from the providers (I didnt try BSAS last year). You could be scoring 80+ on all mocks but if they give you some vignettes where you don’t know what the hell’s going on, all that practice won’t do too much for you.
Bottom line: Understand and knowing the material beats practice as far as Level II is concerned. Practice is important, EOCs are super important, but dont think that Qbank or whatever will “teach” you what you need to know. Just my 2 cents.
Trogul - if you don’t mind me asking, did you take L1 in December 2011?
scary wont sleep tonight 
OMG!!!
Honestly i think its going to boil down to getting lucky with getting item sets with questions your familiar with… like i’m good (I hope) with pensions, multinational, but not as good with intercorporate investments…
hey cgottosu I took it in June 2011. I started preparing around start of October 2011.
So did I. I found that the schweser mocks were a fair representation of difficulty level of the exam. No provider will provide questions presented or worded like the actuall exam. Use the practice exams as a guide to point out strengths and weaknesses. Start with Fra, equity and 2 - 3 other topics and know them like the back of your hand. Being 100% confident on 4 to 5 areas is better than being 70% confident on all the material in my opinion.
I think we’re people go wrong is taking practice exams just for the sake of taking practice exams. I was guilty of that last year. Take what you missed and really dig into CFAI material.