I thought I’d make a post since I wanted to help people out and I never got a good answer to this question.
On the level 1 exam, i got a 78% and was in the 92 percentile. If I averaged the 3 mock exam that is provided by CFA on their new website, I had a 70%. The real exam is definitely easier, so i’d say if you are scoring in the 65-70 range, you should be good to pass.
Let me know if you have any questions
How on earth do you know your exact grade and percentile?
Know* (sorry for being a grammar nazi)
Well, i have narcissistic tendencies, so I wanted to know how badly I beat my peers.
They give you your scores on a line with an absolute 70% line. If you take a millimeter ruler and measure from the bottom of the y-axis, to the top, you will see that 70% line is in the 70% of the axis, so you can make the assumption that the bottom is 0% and the top is 100%, then you just measure across to see how far high your score is and you can map out your score for each section. Then its just a sumproduct of your scores and the weights of the sections.
Similarly, for your ranking, you know where the 90th percentile line is and if you assume the top is the 100th percentile, you can map out with a ruler where your percentile is
Ha ha
You managed to pass by a wide margin, congratulations.
However, it appears those quantitative methods did not pay off despite awesome score, otherwise you would have probably connected the dots why such a method is not applicable.
As far as my results are concerned, I was in time squeeze and did my first problem about 45 days prior to the exam. Due to time squeeze I only managed to do all practice questions and did not do any mocks. My percentile rank, without any restart, was 75th but on the actual exam day I ended up with like 1mm below 90th percentile. Another issue with comparing these percentiles rank can be seen in the fact that most people restart their scores while other do not do so or like me do not have enough time to re-do the problems.
In summary, I would say that if your first attempt percentile rank goes up to say, 65th percentile, you stand a very good chance of passing.
I believe you are incorrectly reading my statement, percent and percentile are not the same
I think you’re right for the individual sections, but I think the approximation is off for the overall score. This is because, using this logic, the 33% of people between the MPS and the 90th percentile score would take up less space than the top 10% of candidates… so the scale would suddenly change once the 90th percentile line was hit. My guess is that the y axis is score rather than percentile, and is consistent with the individual sections. So your percentile is probably slightly higher than 92.
I think I got 87 on the exam, and scored 79 on my final mock. My final mock was not done in the last few days though - my final preparation was based on filling in gaps.
for the overall score, i am just looking at percentiles, not making any judgments on what the MPS is. So its fair to assume that the top of the y-axis is 100th percentile and we know the 90th percentile, so just by looking at that, can can see that if you are approximately 20% above the 90th percentile, then you should be in the 92nd percentile
While you are correct that the y-axis is score, its not possible to get a score from the percentile, but I believe you can find your approximate percentile.
What we’re disagreeing about is whether the y axis is the score or whether it is the percentile. I believe it is the score, and not the percentile. The reasons are as such:
The positioning of the overall score (as a fraction of the graph’s height) is pretty much the same as the weighted average of the section scores, at least in my case. This would imply that the y axis was score, and that the MPS and percentile lines were just put on it where they fell.
The scale on a graph must remain constant. The scale can’t get denser or more spaced out in certain parts of the graph. You have some information: 43% of candidates scored at or above the MPS, and 10% scored at or above the 90th percentile. That means that 33% of candidates scored between these two lines. The distance between these two lines is smaller than the distance between the 90th percentile and the top of the graph, which means that once you hit the 90th percentile, the scale suddenly becomes four times as stretched out if the scale is percentile. You don’t run into this issue with the score on the y-axis instead of percentile.
The graph is labeled as score rather than percentile.
As such, I think that the best way to estimate a percentile would be to find the z score (you can find the standard deviation from where the 90th percentile lies), and to then find the percentile that way. It’s still an approximation.
Yes, it sure looks like the score, not the percentile.
In my research on the old <50, 51-70, >70% scores, I found percentile distributions for some other tests. They were not close to normal, so the z scores don’t work.
However, as you would expect, percentiles were closer together near the mean. For example, scoring 1% higher near the mean might move you from 50th to 55th percentile. Let’s say 90th percentile was 80% correct for an exam, scoring 81% correct might only move you to 92nd percentile.
I don’t disagree with the y-axis. If you see my last sentence, i said, i agree that all y-axis are scores not percentiles.
its a mapping which I’m speaking of. From the sections, you know where the 70% score is. From there you can calculate your score.
What I then say is that on the overall exam, you know where the 90th percentile is, above that is the top 10th percentile. If you then see where your line is, you can gauge how much above your percentile is from the 90th percentile, but that doesn’t say anything about the score. The score can be retrieved only from each section
How do you all feel about the new way that scores are reported? It seems like the CFA wants to convey more info to candidates, while also saying that scores are only estimates of performance. There’s more info in that we can see more precisely how we scored based on the position of our score line. But there’s also a confidence band.
When I took the Level I exam, the scores were under the old system (below 50%, 50-70%, and greater than 70%). I kind of liked the simplicity of that system.
Just curious how you all feel.
The old system made precise comparisons between test takers at a single exam impossible for those who passed. If scores were very far apart, you might know who did better, but not by how much. This led to what I think was an intentional emphasis on pass or fail instead of scores by test takers and employers. I think curiosity of exam takers ultimately wore the Institute down. I don’t think this was driven by employers.
While the comparisons of people who took the same exam might be informative under the new regime, I don’t know what steps the Institute will take to prevent bad comparisons for people who tested in different years. If I put a Dec 17 chart next to a June 18 chart for Level 1, the exams are different, and could easily have minimum scores several points apart. More subtly, the higher end of the distribution could be very different. So, when two students from different exams compare, it might not work well.
Longer term, employers might slowly start to ask for score charts. Many of those would not follow the subtleties, but would look for students scoring 90th percentile or better. The closest we get now is saying they prefer candidates who passed on the first attempt, and that is not common.
Took L1 in June 2018. Read through all of the material from March into mid May (don’t do this). From mid May-2wks before the test, I worked on practice questions from the CFAI materials and Kaplan qbank for 3hrs minimum every day and 6-8 hrs every day for the last two weeks. On the CFAI mock tests, I ranged from 52%-76%. On the Kaplan qbank I was averaging in the high 60’s on the quizzes making my scoring better than 68%-74% of users. Wound up passing. My advice is give yourself plenty of time to study, don’t read the text verbatim, practice more questions than I did, keep a calm head, and CRUSH ETHICS!