Guys, I am retaking the Level 2 this year. The part I screwed up the most last year was Ethics. I imagine I might have gotten 2 or 3 out of 12 in this section.
I want to be able to get 100% on these things, there has to be a trick to them. Are there any CFA ethics guru’s out there that can perhaps enlighten me with any tips and tricks that have worked out for you guys?
The Mixa.
Also interested, ethics crushed me last year, and totally took the steam out of my test.
ethics is always a hit or miss situation…did you find yourself second guessing your answers alot? Most of the time I just follow my first instinct.
I don’t think there is a secret to passing ethics…just rinse and repeat and try to reason out your mistakes from first principles…then learn those principles as they may appear on the exam
This my advise…it worked well for me in all 3 levels (all above 70%)
Read the material from CFAI once at the very beginning. Including the guidelines and examples (leave EOC for last).
Print out the Code of Ethics from the CFAI website. 1 page. Read it once or twice per week. It’s probably a 2min. reading.
During the last 2 weeks before the test review the material very briefly and do the EOC. Keep reading that code (1page) once or twice per week.
This is also an ideal topic if you commute or workout to have on audio format.
Answering ethics question has to become a Habit IMHO. So practise is the key, no point practising standalone ones… Practise from old books/schweser/finquiz or whatever source and keep doing that. If you exhaust doing that, dont worry you can just redo the same… Believe me your answers could be different and mistakes could be different 
So you would learn anyway…
I used to do 3-5 questions a day (or a vignette a day) for around 3 months… I covered all the bases that way… Schweser has come up with CFA prep app for Android as well. I found it quite useful… My travel times or waiting times at public places I used to practise from it. Quite good content as well.
All the very best.
I don’t know if anyone here can claim 100% proficiency in the Ethics section. A lot of the questions are not completely objective - it’s like being a referee in a basketball game. Most people recommend just taking a lot of practice questions until you get a good sense of what is right and wrong from a CFA perspective.
I agree Ohai. Nobody can claim that and I believe the state of mind also determines the way we answer ethics questions…
Please dont laugh at me, I always take Ethics when I am fresh and settled. For this reason, I tend to take it as the second vignette
I disagree with the notion that the Level 2 Ethics section cannot be gamed.
The net difference between Level 1 and Level 2 Ethics is Research Objectivity + Soft Dollar Standards. That alone should suggest that a non-trivial portion of Ethics questions will come from those two areas (otherwise there would be no point in introducing new material). These new sections have considerably less material than the Code and Standards, so even for quant types like me, brute-force memorization is no big deal. That, along with some common sense for ethical behavior and vestigial knowledge from L1, should already give you a good base score in Ethics, even without any further practice.
I don’t think I spent more than two days on Ethics in total.
Good for you that you can clear Ethics stuff in 2 days preparation.
I dont think majority of the people will agree with you though…