Exam strategy 8 - more on practice exams

Hello everyone, it’s been quite some time without an update on this blog, 11 days to be exact. That’s correct, I am counting the days guys. A lot has happened the last week and half for me, mostly work related. The market has been very volatile for this time period, we’ve seen money flow in various directions and it’s been a concern at the company. Nevertheless, CFA clock is still ticking. I want to say thank you to the guys who were concerned about the blog, your comments are much appreciated. You should probably be counting the remaining days now before your exam, with 6.5 weeks left as of this post, I hope you guys have already covered most if not all materials for your exam. Logging your days and hours in the preparation of the exam is recommended. Having a calendar at your desk probably will keep you on track; I would expect your planning is precise now to the day. Make sure to accomplish your plan each and every day from now to the exam day.

The CFA preparation is roughly divided to two stages, the marathon and the sprint. I will not take the credit for this, the concept was widely shared by a few people I know from studying the CFA. The marathon is the many months candidates spend to read through the curriculum, the sprint is the very last few weeks in which candidates reinforce what they have learned in the marathon. As it sounds like, the sprint should be a lot more intensified than the marathon. Today, I want to cover another strategy designed to optimize the sprint – exam practice.

I’ve designed the sequence of my posts slightly ahead of the schedule for the December exam, so if you are not doing practice questions yet don’t worry, just try to wrap up the readings and get ready for the sprint. But if you are ready, proceed to do exam-like sessions, assuming you’ve studied thoroughly all readings and completed all EOC and CFA text EOC questions.  So the sprint will probably take roughly a month (or within 3 - 5 weeks) right before the exam date. The earlier the better, but not too early. Don’t get too hung up on the EOC questions, skip them if you didn’t have time, and just start doing exam questions.

When you start doing exam like questions, it is extremely important to simulate a real exam experience, time at least the morning sessions and maybe afternoon sessions just like the real exam. This way you will get a real feeling of the exam and how you will perform under pressure, although it’s not really the same pressure you will experience.  Keep in mind, the exam is 6 hours long, the level 1 exam has 240 multiple choice questions, which means you have 1.5 minutes for every question. For the Level 2 exam, candidates have 50% fewer questions but taking twice as much time to answer each multiple choice question. 3 minutes per question would also include the reading the question vignettes and formulating the answer. For level 3 people, you will have seen the vignette format already in l2, so practice the morning session as much as you can, timing the morning session is everything in l3. I can expend on this topic in a later post but you get the idea for now. Review each exam you've done will also be crucial; I would specially emphasis on the weak areas over the others.

I think if you do at least 3 - 5 mock exams for each level you are likely in a good position, as long as you can keep your score above 70% for the practice exams. For l1,  I did the first 2 mock tests in the last week before my exam, which is not recommended, my score is between 70% and 73%, and I passed the exam above 70%. In l2 & 3, I did at least 4 exams per level. At the end of the day, try to understand what you are being tested in each question, not just for the sake of getting the right answer. 

Study hard guys and have a productive week.