Plan of Attack for November Exam

[bluechips707]

For everyone who passed Level 3 or studying right now how are planning to prepare for the morning session? I ran out of time last time I wrote for the exam in June. Is anyone looking at old CFA exams and practicing with that? If so, where do you find them? As far as preparing for the computer exam is anyone practicing a certain way for the typing that will need to be done? Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

[Tez4715]

@Tez4715

Last month before the exam, I did full mocks to ensure my timing for the AM was solid and memorised formulas. My timing strategy was to write down as soon as the exam started, what time I should be finished each topic so that I never ran out of time to pick up easy marks. If I hadn’t finished the section by the time allocated at the start of the exam, I simply moved on. For the new computer-based testing, I recommend making note of how many marks are allocated to a section then adding these marks (1mark = 1min) to the current time. This was a great strategy because it allowed me to skip the first two sections that came up on the exam which just so happened to be my weakest areas. I came back to these sections at the end of the exam and I was in full flow at that point so the stuff I was struggling to answer before was pleasantly much easier to recall. This approach also stopped me from becoming panicked at the start of the exam

This will stop time being an issue in the AM

[bluechips707]

Thanks for the response Tez. When you say how many marks are allocated to each section what do you mean by that? Also, where did you find old exams to practice on?

[dasstienn]

You should visit his thread that he referenced above. This kind gentleman shared everything in google drive.

[bluechips707]

Thanks for the reference. Do you know where he found old Level 3 exams by any chance?

[dasstienn]

No clue, but when I was searching myself, I usually would found them through some reddit posts.

[bluechips707]

Thanks.

[Tez4715]

When doing the CBT or past paper exams the questions are broken down into sections. Using the past AM papers as an example, at the start of the paper you get a breakdown of each section e.g. equity, fixed income topics etc. Each section will have a certain amount of marks available so use this number to gauge how much time you need to allocate e.g. Equity section marks = 20 then you’ve to allocate 20mins to answering all the equity section questions. As soon as your time is up, you must move on.
You’ll likely find that you’ll struggle to answer all the questions in the allocated time in some sections but for others you’ll have a spare 5/10mins which you can use at the very end of the exam to go back over missed questions or marked questions you would like to tackle for longer.
This strategy will ensure you’ve had time to tackle every question, otherwise it is very easy to run down a rabbit hole in the exam when answering questions you think you should know. With the new exam format every mark now has more weight so no one can afford to miss easy points because they ran out of time.

Past papers are easy enough to find via a Google search, I’ve just collected for my reference and now yours

Best of luck with the exam!

[bluechips707]

I received my results last week and by God’s grace I passed level 3. I wanted to tell you many thanks for posting your notes on the forum and I feel like they helped me tremendously in the 11th hour and leading up to the exam. In my opinion level 3 was the hardest exam so I am so happy to have it done and over with. Thanks again for your help and for your tips on a plan of attack.

[S2000magician]

Congratulations, bluechips!