You know, Ethics is weird. I always scored really high on Ethics when I was taking mocks at all three levels (in the 80s and 90s) and yet I never once did well on it in a live exam. Got 50-70 for Level 1, <50 for Level 2, and 50-70 for Level 3 with the score line indicating 58%.
So I learned after Level 1 to not rely on Ethics for points. Perhaps that’s something to keep in the back of your mind? Try to clear 80 on your mocks but also try to score as high as you can outside of Ethics so that you correct for that potential crapshoot? Just a suggestion from my own studying and exam results.
My advice would also be to start practicing Essay Questions in April / May to have some buffer (I started early June and was a bit under pressure due to time constraint.
totally agree with this. CFAI has not figured out a reasonable way to test ethics and it shows with the questions they ask and the results like yours that many candidates see. I know that on all of my practice ‘rounds’ and mocks my ethics scores were highly variable not because I’m unethical or didn’t know the material but just due to the arbitrariness and incomplete nature of the info given in the questions. Makes I sort of a bad joke on the candidates that they have an ethics adjustment.
My very last mock exam before the real exam I got 50/60 on the PM. 5 of the 10 questions I missed were Ethics. It’s just hard to get a handle on the subject and since CFAI insists on having no transparency into the answers on the live exams, I just learned to work around it. Which is pretty lame, I’d rather just be better at it but with no feedback on why my logic is off, there isn’t much else to do.
But to my original point, I had 43/48 on the non Ethics questions which was also something I was evaluating myself on. 43 questions right on the PM is already a solid score, and that’s before any Ethics question was graded. That was how I practiced and that’s how I suggest the OP practices also.
I always scored good in ethics (L1 and L2 > 70%) but this year only a 50%. Not a surprise, because already during the exam I was saying “what the f… of questions are this?” very ambiguous and unclear to be honest. Completely different from mock exams, CFA curriculum books,…
Maybe it’s worth paying for multiple independent grades of
AM mocks… the most reasonable explanation to that AM performance on exam day compared to what you were averaging is that you graded yourself too optimistically?
Make sure you time yourself too. I spent too much time on low point questions and ended up leaving full questions blank that I could have answered. I was scoring in the 70s for the am mocks but when I got my results back my am score was barley above 50.
Clearly, it’s more than possible to pass and no doubt I can do it with a different study routine. But the sacrifices of the preparation are not worth it to me. We all give up some things to prepare for these tests and I’m not willing to make those sacrifices again. That to me is the issue. I have other professional goals that are more important as they lead directly to more money, freedom, and an earlier retirement. Congratulations on passing, it is a good achievement and you should be proud.
Can’t fault the ‘Opportunity Cost’ or ‘Return On Investment’ assessment approach for the Charter. It is not the same for everyone. Sunk costs are not supposed to impact your future strategic decisions (ie. Level 1 and 2). Then there is the ‘Never Quit’ and ‘Determination’ factors that completely disregard ROI, Opportunity Costs abd Sunk Costs. With a user name of jimhockey56, you probably don’t back down from anything. Good luck with your decision. Hope there are no regrets.
I agree with the others on ethics. I usually get solid 5/6 or 6/6 on all my mocks. And for some reason during the actual exam I was at 50%. It doesn’t make sense. Luckily I scored high enough in the AM to kind of provide some cushion for that but cfai do suck at making eghics questions clear and concise on the real deal.
Personally I was never able to judge my performance on the exam. It always came at odds with my expectations.
In L1 and L3 where I passed on first attempt, I left not feeling that good about my performance. Especially with L3, omg, the AM session felt like an absolute failure to me. When I failed L2, I was so confident about my performance, I thought I nailed the exam, and was shocked when I saw the results.
The exam is generally time-pressured, so I am not surprised. It is not like we can pay attention to how well we did overall, especially that it is a two long sessions. We’d be busy answering questions and moving on. It is usually just a general feeling about the performance, and this feeling isn’t quite “scientific”.
