I’ve read a number of posts in a number of threads about doing mock exams for Level III.
Many of those posts extol the virtue of doing as many mock exams (especially morning session mocks) as possible.
Those posts are . . . um . . . crap.
Unquestionably, there is a benefit to doing mock exams: you learn to budget your time, you learn to format your answers appropriately, and so on.
What many candidates don’t seem to grasp is that there can be a detriment to doing mock exams. Or, more specifically, there can be a detriment to doing poorly written mock exams. And there can be a detriment to relying on (even well-written) mock exams as an indication of how you will perform on the real exam.
Many mocks are, frankly, garbage. They aren’t structured as the real exam is structured. (For example, they ask generic questions that can be answered without reading the vignette. Or they allocate marks in a manner that is inconsistent with CFA Institute’s practice.) Or they target incredibly obscure topics. Or they’re overly computational. Or they offer poor (or nonexistent) explanations for the answers. Or . . . on and on.
I’ve written my fair share of Level III mock exams. Some of the questions have been very good. Some have been awful. Most have fallen in between these extremes.
If you plan to take a number of practice (mock) exams for Level III, please use your best discernment when answering the questions and when reviewing the guideline answers. Often, the problem will be with the exam writer, not with you. You need to be able to make the distinction.
I couldn’t agree more! And there is a learning curve too where you would reach a point such that adding mock exams won’t be adding that much value (reminds me of economics; the concept of adding capital and the impact of TFP!) - I also totally get how doing poor quality mocks could give us the wrong sort of practice.
I’ve never done that many mock exams, at L1, I didn’t do any, just practiced schweser questions, at L2 I did 5 and some CFAI QB and this was probably enough given that I passed with a good margin. I also never marked myself, I have no idea how much I scored on the mocks (only the CFAI one mock because it is online), I couldn’t care less how much I score on the mocks, real exam is what matters, and I want neither the false confidence nor the loss of my confidence over the mock scores.
One more thing, i never timed myself, I always took my time answering mocks, seems like a big mistake, but it never impacted my performance on an exam and I’ve done other professional exams, not just CFA,
S2000magician are you going to write mocks for lvl 3 this year also? I used your mocks for level 2 through MM (which you wrote part of them). But, as I know MM is not going to provide mocks this year. Where we can access your mocks?
P.S. some of questions from real exam, I remembered only from MM mocks, other mocks even CFAI’s ones didn’t cover those questions.
AND, even when you do the actual real past exam papers, you start thinking that the morning sesh will be super easy and that the questions will repeat the following years.
HA! I fell for this trap. I’m not talking about IPS questions, those are all usually similarly strucutred, but my expectations for the 2019 L3 exam were that they would be at least somewhat similar in difficulty to prior years exams. I was super caught off guard though. Just remember anything is fair game.
My objective to write the answers in bullet point style for so many mock exams (at least 14-16 mock exam) while seeing the answers is only to prepare me with 14,000,605 possible type of questions on real exam.
Boston mock is curse by so many peoples in this forum because of its quality, but it helps me to prepare 1 single question on real exam for Fixed Income (end up being above 90th percentile this year).
in the case i found there is a good Bluebox/EOC not covered everywhere by prep providers, i create the spesific mock exam for that question, not so hard actually only create some structure response we expect based on BB/EOC.
being busy with my job and master degree class (friday night & saturday half day until afternoon) and starting late (early april 2019) i cannot pass this exam without my prep providers support.
PS : i only do real timing mock once for Daren Miler 2nd mock.
I’ve actually found quite a lot of questions from mock exams that mirror the real exam, in all three levels.
Even in level 3, after taking the test, I thought to myself… wow, I just did at least 6 questions that were almost identical to mock questions from MM, Kaplan, and other mocks I’ve taken…
And then there are questions like required returns that are just tricky and you improve with practice. The first 4 required return mock questions I did, got way off base. After doing so many, I learned the trick and recognized the patterns… After that, required returns were my favorite question to get easy points!
the mocks are good to get a feel for pacing and knowing which questions to immediately skip and come back to.
once you get to level 3 though, the pm mocks are not very important. you can do the 2 cfai provides, but that is enough.
you should be doing more of the am mocks. i would say you should do at least 6-8.
the first one is to say WTFBBQ. the second one to say WTF. the 3rd one to say wtf. the 4th one is where you get a feel for pacing. the 5th one to get a feel for how much to write and how sloppy you can get your writing and still be legible. the 6th one to start determining strategy…
one pattern i’ve noticed with the past mocks is that there was a correlation between how difficult the personal IPS “calculate return required” question was and the rest of the other questions on that mock exam. This question was usually an 8+ point question. If it asked for a return calculation that was a doozy i’ve never seen before, then that was a good indication that the rest of the exam was “easier”. If that question was a layup type question, then i peppered my angus for the other questions to come in the other sections.
I think it is only this year when CFAI released amended paper of 2018. CFAI started making major changes in the curriculum from 2017 so we had no problem using past papers till then.
Thank you for the info and the link! I’d be very hesitant to use the very old ones, I’d think questions style and content has changed so much over the years!! I suppose the three years CFAI provides are already ammended to reflect any curriculum changes, since there have been a lot of changes in 2020 syllubus.
I took 0 mocks. Only watched video solutions and read CFAI answer keys for past exams. Frankly, I’ve never really felt the need to “simulate exam conditions”, because I’ve been used to taking exams under time constraints.
