please share your opinion
Hard.
I scored over 90% in practice problems, and over 80% in my mocks.
Moreover, I went over all the questions which I got wrong in mocks and practice problems to make sure I understand everything. I also derived all the formulas I’ve seen by math instead of memorizing them to make sure I fully understand them.
Even in this case, I wasn’t able to get 2 calculations(one of my calculation couldn’t be found in the multiple choices after I calculated using different methods for five times) during the exam, and I saw multiple questions which I’ve never seen before.
Finally, ethics questions are disasters——some of them are straight forward, but for some of them I even couldn’t understand the readings.
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I passed.
You? 
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Will please share your strategy for passing? Materials used and such!
I didn’t do anything besides using practice problems and mocks provided by CFA Institute. I even didn’t read the book for all the three exams; probably the reason is that I went to a good school in the States and the courses I took are too hard when comparing with knowledge covered by the program.
It’s true that the real exam is not easy, but my recommendation would be try to understand everything instead of memorizing them because obviously, there are too many things to be memorized if that’s how you studied for it.
For all the math, I summarized in to 30 pages at the very beginning, and I derived all the formulas by math a week before the exam so that I would be able to do all types of calculation during the exam without memorizing the formulas/plan for something unexpected.
For conceptual questions, use your own words to summarize all the main points instead of reading the book.
My final notes before the exam is probably 40-50 pages in total(math and concepts). The rest, for sure, spend time on ethics since my notes didn’t cover that.
Good luck.
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Difficulty was as expected.
Some topics I thought would show up did, some others didn’t but you can’t skip any topic
Time management was crucial for me as it’s easy to get hung up in a never-ending calculation and waste precious time to solve “easier” questions.
I couldn’t get 2 calculations right, one was an essay so I did my best at trying to earn partial credit, and another one was an answer choice, so I picked one randomly.
One tough calculation showed up and I was very happy to find exactly one of the answer choices.
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Same thing here.
A lot of topics didn’t show up when I thought they would be tested, and I’ve got 1-2 questions there which I was like “how come you wanna ask for this???”
And yea, exactly the same thing, I’ve got two questions which could never be calculated based on normal method.
Also, ethics is really a disaster, even though I thought I’ve understood all the ethics practice problems/mocks.