Just finished mine and got 63% on both. FI, FRA, and Ethics were my lowest with FI being the only score below 50%. I got 100% on Equity on PM so without that I’d be screwed overall. I completely agree about the little nuances. For a bunch of my wrong answers I did all the steps right but then made a mistake at the end to find my (wrong) answer they oh so nicely included.
I was also surprised by derivatives. I have an 89% average for the TT I’ve done but ended up with 61% here. It was a lot deeper knowledge wise than calculations which I find easier.
Just gonna do mock after mock of just my weak topics over the next few days to pull them up to the rest while still doing TT for all to keep the knowledge fresh of others.
Also I’m just curious how long it took everyone to do the exams? For Level 1 I never timed myself for any mocks and wrote until the time expired at the actual exam. But for this mock each one took 2 hours. My score wasn’t the best so maybe that’s why it didn’t take me longer but I’m still curious.
I did 58/58… finished each with about 20 minutes to spare. Also, have done better on Schweser mocks (have done both volumes)… from here, just reviewing concepts.
Does anyone else feel like the Schweser mocks are much easier than the CFAI? I feel like the CFAI mock actually made me confused about some of the concepts I learnt. Which one is more realistic?
When I did level 1 last year, I don’t remember CFAI mock being too much more difficult than Schweser, but this year, it seems to be otherwise. I scored 66 on CFAI AM and 78 on Schweser AM, which is a significant difference.
i find the opposite, data and info presented in scheweser mocks are all over the place and the calculations are almost always multi-step and has a ripple effect on some questions where if you get the first question wrong, you’ll get second question wrong (e.g. first question answer used as an input for second question)
schweser mock is good to use as practice questions, it is absolute BS to use as an actual mock, their require you to use the answer from one question in order to compute the next. And the best thing is, they are lazy, they do not provide any number to u in case u can’t do the first question. So in this regard, schweser is very pointless. They are only good for practice question where i did them item set by item set, topic by topic.
Okay, i got 63% on AM with 9 questions i couldnt do left blank, if include those random draw the score goes up by 3 questions or to 68%. As for PM, I got 66.66% with 5 blanks, include the expected value of those the score becomes 69%.
For AM: there are questions people can answer by reading schweser notes once, and there are questions people (at least me) can’t answer after reading the notes 5 times. In particular the pension question on CFO and CFF, if u apply the formula on TPPC u wont get the answer, their solution is much easier. Also equity is silly and I got 0/6 in equity.
For PM: again equity is supposed to be my strong part but i fail to do 2-3 questions in the 2 item sets, all in all got 50% in PM equity. Got really pissed in Alternatives, the whole item set is focused on commodities? ie. the least important topic in alternatives? I think a guy with commodities knowledge can get better score than me without studying. I got 50% and i did study this section multiple times.
Can someone confirm the difficulty and pattern of the real exam vs CFAI mock? we all know that it is supposed to be the closest to the real thing, but are we going to expect like 60-70% extremely difficult concept questions and ~30% calculations? Although I am not very good at the calculations but i already feel that i wasted way too much time to learn how to calculate stuff like swaps and FRA when in the CFAI mock all they test is the difference between pricing and valuing and the value of swap at initiation. Feel so discourage the way that some of the questions are way too simple and ppl with 20% of effort of mine would be able to answer it, while there are questions especially concept one they make it so difficult and even though you know the concept you still wont be sure you can answer them correctly.
Edit: I found that overall i did very poorly on both FRA and equity, are the questions in the mock particularly difficult or not? I expect in the real exam the weighting on these 2 might be even higher and the “pretty decent” score i have now does not represent anything.
You guys are doing much better than me. I am scoring around 50%, not sure what is going on but even in my stronger subjects I am not doing good. For level 1 I was crushing Ethics and Equity and I feel confident when I do those questions, but I end up getting 3/6 or 4/6 on each item set. Less than one week to go, I am starting to feel like I just wasted 6 months of my life.
Yea, I averaged 71 across the 3 full exams in Schweser vol2, and got a 59 on the CFAI mock. Insane. I hope the real thing is closer to Schweser in terms of difficulty
Yea, I averaged 71 across the 3 full exams in Schweser vol2, and got a 59 on the CFAI mock. Insane. I hope the real thing is closer to Schweser in terms of difficulty
what do you find more difficult in CFA mock than in schweser? I personally think that the concept stuff can be extremely difficult, on the other hand schweser more on calculations.
I don’t have a preference between conceptual/calculations. I thought ethics and FRA on the CFA mock were brutal. After going through it, I found 9 questions that I should have gotten right and I don’t know where my head was at when I answered them. That would have pushed my score up to a 67, which I would have been way happier with (but also may not be so inclined to study as hard these last few days). So I guess my thing is being careful reading the question and info in its entirety and not rushing.
I’ve been told by a couple of people I know that the CFAI mock was much harder than the actual exam over the last couple of years. I don’t know how true this is.
Ethics absolutely killed me. Like for one question it asked about if the rules about trading violated. It said that can only trade accounts where you’re the beneficiary after you trade for clients. Reading it I thought okay since it doesn’t say anything about family accounts that are fee-paying clients too which get same treatment as regular clients, any account that you’re the beneficiary is likely your personal account which should be traded after fee-paying clients. Got it wrong.
Anyone have any tips for ethics? I need a lot of help. Schweser mocks I was getting 75%+ on ethics but on TT and the CFAI mock it’s all been in the 50s.
I dont know, it seems a lot of you did poorly on ethics. Yes, ethics can be very tricky but i honestly think that the ethics in the CFAI mock was really fair. I got 3 wrong in total. Actually, when I did the CFAI ethics TT i was struggling huge, looking back, i think the main reason is that i was trying to rush though it and second i had to do it in a computer and i couldn’t highlight important bit in pen. After scoring 50% and feeling crap in first few ethics TT. I adjusted myself and started thinking carefully, then the remaining TT I did fair.
I would suggest doing the CFA ethics TT again, i promise you even though you think you remember the answers you WILL get wrong and repeat the same mistakes. However, after your second try in CFA ethics TT, i promise you will get better and start to adjust to their style naturally. Relax on ethics, you all know the stuff, just think carefully. I am doing decently in ethics (at least it seems that way now) and english isn’t even my first language, so im sure everyone of you will be fine.
Meanwhile i am struggling in equity which im most confidence of, got <50% in the mock.