Oh my God :O, I am in the same boat.
Even though everybody says equity is super easy.
L3 is all about mastering the “pros and cons” of 1,000 strategies. Overall I thought the material seemed easier reading it until I went through and realized how much you need to know. By the end though, I got to a place where I felt like I had my arms around the L3 material better than I did the L2 material, but I spent a lot more time on it, and didn’t really get to that place until the days before the exam. IMO L3 ends up being harder than L2 especially given that the answers aren’t literally in front of you for half the exam (i.e. can’t flip around your errors in a ratio and back into an answer, etc). Regardless, just keep chipping away at it and see what you can get done.
I’ve just read all material of Schweser and started to revise and make EOC exercises from CFAI.
My opinion is that it’s 2x times more difficult than I expected. I barely scored 50% in EOC Bahavioral Finance.
Moreover I dont know how to prepare to essay tests…
Tough moment.
My plan is trying to reread the units and check the EOC exercises. After take some notes to help to fix the knowledge.
LMAO I almost spit out my coffee at the Erickson comment. None of us need that kind of negativity in our lives. It’s hilarious how legendary that topic test was.
My biggest advice for LIII is write until your hand is numb and then keep writing. There is great value in training your mind in spitting out those answers quickly and concisely. At first it will feel like you freeze up or almost as bad, you end up scribbling a bunch of nonsense that is long and wastes your time. Be efficient and be quick. Good luck everyone.
In short, there are three keys to getting good at the Level III AM questions.
The first is: practice.
The second is: practice.
I don’t recall what the third one is, but I know that there’s a third one.
Level II was pretty hard. Level III pretty free. There’s real positive thinking! 
People fail Level III for A) running out of time, especially in the AM and B) hedging their answers/not answering the original question to begin with. Level III is no walk in the park, despite what everyone says. Just. Take. Practice. Tests…
In Level III, you need to know not just the correct answer, but WHY it’s the correct answer. Be specific in your rationale and connect the dots, but don’t spend time with needless narrative or with vague BS. Graders don’t care about that stuff. But they do care about your reasoning and they can detect crap answers. Do NOT repeat the question, and don’t write narrative.
For example, the correct answer to a given problem in fixed income risk might be “increased duration.” A vague justification for the answer that gets no points could be “higher duration = increased portfolio risk.” This tells us almost nothing of importance. However, a specific justification that has more value might be, “higher duration = increased sensitivity to rising interest rates which affects foundation’s ability to meet funding obligations.” You’ve got to connect the dots to show CFAI that you really understand how parts move together.
Dig up as many actual past CFA essay exams as you can find, and take each one, then STUDY the answer key. Look at the substance of the answer – ask yourself, where did they go with this problem? What were they after on the answer? Grind through these answer keys and you’ll begin to get a sense of what graders are after. Practice this again and again.
No matter how prepared you are, the actual morning exam will feel like someone is holding gun and a stopwatch to your head. Stay on top of your time and DONT fall behind. If your brain can’t think through a particular problem, move on and come back at the end. It’s a bloody race and you just have to go with it. You may feel $hitty at lunchtime, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t pass.
Curriculum wise L3 is actually easier than L2 but the L3 morning exam is substantially more difficult as it leaves very little room for guessing and most candidates are just used to the multiple choice format. The afternoon L3 exam is comparable or even easier then the afternoon L2 exam.
By the end of it, level 2 was actually fun. There wasn’t a single question that could trick me.
But this level 3 sht has got me feeling some type of way.
Level 2 was a fun and Level 3 was a party with after hours funky Chill out.
#saythattomyface
My feelings were actually the opposite. I felt Level 2 was reasonably enjoyable at the end (except for FRA), but I thought Level 3 was really cool. I thought of the morning questions almost as cool little puzzles to solve, so I actually think the Level 3 AM section was my favorite part of the whole program. It’s definitely a race against the clock like another poster said, but it was a lot of fun just the same.
I will also say I was way more certain of a pass on Level 3 leaving the exam than I was when I left Level 2.
The one guy in our study group who left the exam feeling confident was the only guy who had to retake L3.
FWIW, candidates have no objective way to measure their readiness by scoring practice exams. This is because CFAI requires graders not to share any information on how exams are scored, so the information cannot filter down to Schweser and the other providers.
Good thing I paid for Daren Miller (former cfa grader) to grade my practice mocks! I’m sure you can pay off the international folks that were temp graders paid by CFAi that was illegal (according to DOJ)
No comment on Daren, but maybe you might spend a little extra time on Book 1?
While graders are not allowed to share information on how the exams are scored, anyone with modicum of intelligence can infer how to score many, probably most, of the questions. Couple that with the guideline answers that they publish and it’s even easier.
That said, I still think that it’s a good idea to have someone else – someone skilled in the curriculum – grade your practce exams. You may know exactly what you mean in an answer, but the key is that the grader has to know exactly what you mean.
Of course, the fact that I grade practice exams is nothing more than a happy coincidence. 
Confidence is certainly a relative thing to be fair. But I do stand by my statement in that I would have been shocked if I failed Level 3 (whereas I considered it a real possibility for Level 2).
I am also somewhat lucky in that while I don’t know how a grader would grade the Level 3 AM section, I did used to grade University level exams when I was in graduate school so that gave me a fairly good sense of how it might be graded (and my actual AM score was pretty close to my mock scores).
I think this is good advice. I was very careful when grading to see if I thought another person would understand what I meant. But that is fairly challenging to do. Definitely easier to have someone look over your work.
You would think that intelligent people would have an idea how to score their own questions, but I can tell you from experience that the vast majority either don’t know how, or forget how , to correctly explain their answers on exam day. Just look at the pass rates for L3, and realize that all those guys who didn’t pass were smart enough to clear L2!
Your suggestion of studying guideline answers is an excellent idea, but candidates should also practice the related exams and then compare their own answers to the guideline. Treat the morning exam as though it were its own Study Session.
S2000magician, did you take L3 in 2012? Your name looks familiar.