dude keep your chin up, ain’t no shame failing a test where 60% of the population taking fails regularly
u gave it your best shot. this is just a test, dun mean u will fail in other things
u got a whole life ahead. no point always dragging yourself down n dwelling over this
gd luck in ur future endeavours!
u dun have to go around putting people down u know
Bro I understand how defeated you must feel right now. I failed level 1 twice, level 2 twice and level 3 twice. Each time you fail you feel as though you lose a piece of yourself especially when you see others passing with such relative ease. It gets harder and harder to pick yourself up each time.
After reading this entire thread I do believe your problem is not the material or memorization it’s your command of the English language. The questions on these exams are very tricky even for native English speakers. English is my first language and still I was never 100% sure what they were asking. By the time I figured it out I had wasted too much time and was constantly rushing which caused me to make stupid mistakes.
I have also realized that the CFA exam is not your friend. It is designed to make it easy to fail. Questions that look straight forward usually have some twist or trick to it. Sometimes they are straight forward but most times not. And that is the difficult part, figuring out which is which.
I’m not going to try to tell you whether to continue or give up, that is a decision you need to make for yourself. Either way it does not make you a failure. You haven’t failed in your career. I’m 37 years old and still trying to clear this thing. I started in 2003. I spent 5 years in fixed income research and my boss and I were ranked #1 on wallstreet in consumer products research by Institutional Investor and all I had was a BA in Finance. I worked with traders everyday and I can tell you that you don’t need to be intelligent to be a good trader.
If you do end your journey here just remember you have a family that loves you and that alone makes you a winner. I hope you do continue though, maybe get some English lessons and eventually get that charter. I was really rooting for you this time.
Good luck bro. Stay strong.
I know a similar story. It is about a poor guy who takes L2 for SEVEN times. And he passed at last and got charted at the age of 38.
I think you might be too nervous about the exam. Take it easy and try another time.
Good luck.
Hi. I tutor math. i’m very good. Mainly because I figure out what highschool kids are missing in terms of foundational knowledge and I fill in the gaps. I think I may be able to help you. Free of charge. Because i’m in an excellent mood after passing level II. I’m gonna need your approximate grades per section in average (you have a nice sample size unfortunately). Also, I’ll need you to explain exactly what is difficult for you. My first guess would be logic and deductive reasoning as well as critique of arguments. If that is the case, you’re looking at about 6 months - one year worth of academic part time studying of reasoning. Let me know if anything
NO WAY JOSE!
I would not retake it if i failed 3 times
actually i probably won’t retake it if i failed twice to be very honest.
It’s not THAT important to start with and i don’t think my life changes dramatically with CFA under my belt.
there are so many things worth pursuing more than the CFA program.
As long as you replace your study time with something productive then go for it…
But if you quit to do nothing, 10 years from now you will be kicking yourself
did he/she pass?
No.
Good luck to you friend. Find a fresh beginning and don’t let this weigh you down for the rest of your life.
anyone know if the guy who started this thread passed or not ?
Can you please participate in this short survey? http://cfatutor.me/2013/07/23/results-are-out-congratulations-to-38-of-level-i-and-43-of-level-ii/
Hey, I am original poster.
I failed, band 4, as I wrote yesterday.
And I quit.
Not because I have something better to do or because I am going to enjoy the life.
Not at all.
I am leaving since there is no way to complete it. As late Zig Ziglar put it “if you’ve been doing what you are doing, you’ll be getting what are you getting”.
I put hundreds of hours of good study and got the failure.
And I did it several YEARS in a row.
So if I goh-hoh register for the 2014 and start my review today, I’ll get the same result the next year.
Why?
15% of the test is testing the ‘footnotes’, I mean small comments and formulas which are mentioned once but never discussed in full in the text and never mentioned again in EOC questions.
65% of the test is cross-sectional questions with traps. That is you are given parameters A, B, C and D, and you are given the name of the model, so you quickly put the A… D into the formula, got the results and that is a trap, since in another footnote in a different text was mentioned that instead of D you need to go 5 lines below in the text and calculate X from Y and Z.
20% of the questions are worded like we are studying Sineca’s papers and not finance.
This year I read CFAI text at least twice (some I did 3 times) + did EOC questions. Band 4.
I know the material. It is not my fault I am not a native English speaker. It is not my fault I cannot leave my job and concentrate on the CFA Program only.
And you know what? I have a friend who aced all 3 levels from the first attempt. Really. He always finished each session 20 minutes before the deadline. He made the CFA Programm his first priority. During the 3 years he worked perhaps 6 month. He studied full time. He aced the exams but he is not a charterholder. And he’ll never be: he does not have the work experience. And he cannot get one, since while studying, he did not work, so he had a gap in his resume etc… for now, he’s an accountant, probably he have forgotten 70% of what he learned. He is in his late 30th and he’s alone with his Dad and Mom, he does not have wife, kids or girlfriend. Do I want that success?
So anyway, I have nothing to do with the exam and… I am trying not to do what I was doing (hard study) in order not to get what I was getting (failure in the CFA Program and in career plans).
See you.
And… In order to put all th cards on the table…
I start my day with the American Radio on Internet and read about 15-20 pages of american media every single day. Sometimes I need to check a word or two. But genereally, on 90% of the text I do not need Google Translate.
All this mean I can read and understand well enough. Yes, I have another 3-4 seconds in order to translate the text in my head, but believe me or not, I do not think any course of English can improve my perfomance of CFA Tests.
Cheer up!
I hope you will find something worth doing by next year and you will forget everything about CFA!
it seems like you have a career going already and you can excel in your job with or without CFA, so best of luck to you!!!
NANA
Next time, please, read the thread before making assumptions.
Æsop. (Sixth century B.C.) Fables. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. The Fox and the Grapes ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “Just the things to quench my thirst,” quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.”
Yes. I failed like that fox but I am not fooling myself telling “I never wanted the Chapter”.
After following the most of long posts you made, I figured out (at least I think I did) what’s your problem: arrogance.
A smart ass who aced all the levels with first attempts was pretty much described by you like a loser?
Come on, if that late-30s, no-girlfriend, no-kids, living-with-parents, no-decent-job “loser” is truly a loser, what are you?
I have seen lots of people like you who think themselves deserve better. They don’t. If you fail, you fail, and you failed a whooping 7 times. That is pretty much like a permanent stain in your life.
I really didn’t want to say anything before I saw your post describing that “losesr”. I was actually thinking how to encourage you.
Then I was like: yeah, whatever, an asshole deserved it.
btw, you could probably figured out I am not a native English speaker either. And I don’t want to be cocky by telling you how I did. So move on and get some life.
Sorry to hear you failed. But guess you expected it. What will you do next?
Sure, at this moment your friend doesn’t have the job that he wants. But all he needs is to have someone hire him. And maybe in two or three years people are going to forget about his employment gap and they’ll see his new work experience together with three completed levels of CFA. I know another guy who was also unemployed for over a year after getting his MBA. He used that time to take CFA I and II. He’s now working as a portfolio manager. Nobody cares about that 18 month unemployment period anymore. There was a recession after all.
There’s no rule that says you have to get the CFA while working full time, or that it only counts if you are working full time. Unemployment disappears, the CFA credentials do not.
Think of it this way: he took 18-24 months of his time, lived on the cheap, focused hard, and got through the three exams. He’s missing 18-24 (minus six) months of salary, but he got the credentials and he got more use of his free time. Poor you worked for seven years and gave your free time to the exam (300 hrs X 7 if we include your efforts for level 1). You made more money during that timeframe but you also lost 2100 hours of time (that’s 262 8 hr working days, more than a year) and can only say you passed level 1. Was your friend foolish?
Everyone makes their choices in life. If you want a family, you have to work to support it, but you also get the blessings of having a family.