I left the testing centre at 5pm happy - had given it my best and was pretty confident I passed. I then made a dumb mistake, which was to go to the pub and hear the views of other candidates. I then made another dumb mistake, which was going to great lengths to read every post on this forum related to the difficulty of the exams, which reinforced what I heard at the pub - there were a lot of trick questions in the pm exam.
So, 4 weeks out and I get asked about the exam and how I’m feeling by someone in my life most days. My stock standard answer is:
“Well, the morning exam is the one most people blow up on but I felt pretty good about it and I finished it too, which not everyone did. I spent most of my time studying for this morning exam and was happy with how it went. The afternoon exam seemed pretty easy and I finished with an hour to spare. I went over the questions, marked a few correct answers wrong but couldn’t believe how straight forward it was (with the exception of one particularly grey area). However, I heard it was stacked with trick questions so I now believe I’m 50/50”
Is anyone else in this boat? The “trick question” part of my response has become self-fulfilling… I say the stock-standard answer but I am now convinced I blew it.
Were there really that many “trick questions” or were the people saying this not well prepared for the trivia?
When you are very well prepared, you may find questions easy. My AM wasn’t good. i wasn’t as prepared as i should have been.
I don’t remember the questions but i do recall how i solved it.The afternoon session was tricky. I found 3 vignettes tricky, dunno if i missed tricks elsewhere. In fact I did 2 of them after i had finished the rest of the paper and reviewed it because I has no clue on how to answer them the first time, so figured might as well consolidate what I have solved.
When i started reading them again, I had time to focus and not worry about the rest of the paper. Yes i did find them challenging. the first answer i chose wasn’t always the correct one. Some factor/piece of info directly provided or implied caused the answer to change. I did not spot this immediately and had to go back and read the vignette more than once.
To be honest it is not about “tricks” on the exams. They test your understanding of topics and their inter relationships which may find only a passing mention even in CFAI texts.
I hate the use of the word “tricks” in the exam. All the information is there layed out in the vignette and question itself. If you studied the material well you would know how to answer it no matter how they asked it. If you get a question wrong you have either misread the question (i.e “least likely” most likely and etc), stuffed up in your calculation, simply guessed it or you just don’t know the material well enough to answer the question in the format that CFAI has asked. CFAI themselves have specifically stated that they don’t purposely try to “trick” candidates when they put together these exams. Yes there were footnotes under tables in the exam that needed to be read to answer some questions and twists to normal calculations, however all was clearly stated in the vignette, if you missed these things then bad luck.
^ Same here mate, I dont know what to call something as a trick. Some information I failed to read or given as a note, is not a trick - its that I did not read it. Well I was worrying about what folks called it as a trick in the PM as I found PM to be very straight forward. Now I stopped worrying Either I know it, or I dont know it. Was a bit digital types!
something i may call a trick- 3 options are given, you see the first option and it is correct, without seeing the rest you mark it… however the second option was actually the answer which was more correct… I wont explain anymore else I may be in violation
The vignettes have a tendancy to provide extraneous information. I learned on Level 2 not to over think questions. I ended up getting correct a few questions on PM Level 3 that had extra information that I wasn’t sure what to do with because I made a judgment to ignore it.
1: You didn’t RTFQ (I did this for one) and having not properly read the question you answered a question they were not asking
or
2 You didn’t know the material well enough.
Going around discussing questions afterwars with other candidates will just end up making you unsure as other than CFAI no one knows what the answer to question 15 was.
I was in a SAT prep class before and I remember the teacher talking about tricks. Some ghetto guy nodded his head confidently and said, “I know all about them tricks”. Pun intended of course.
I don’t understand how all these people remember so much about the exam. I remember a handful of big questions from the morning session, but I don’t think I could recall one single PM question.
What I personally mean by trick question is that there was a minor misunderstanding you could have made to move you in the wrong direction AND the answer that would result from doing so was given. If there was some common error you could make, but the resultant answer wasn’t supplied- I generally don’t consider it a trick question. Call it a “trick” or simply “not knowing the material well enough”- but by the CFAI supplying that option, they knew people would make that mistake. As opposed to just not knowing the answer and randomly guessing.
CFA Institute is more than happy to allow candidates to make common mistakes, and to give them the wrong answers corresponding to those mistakes.
There’s nothing remotely tricky about that; indeed, that’s an excellent way to test whether a candidate really knows the material. If such an answer weren’t supplied, a candidate who made a common mistake and didn’t find that answer available would be forced to guess, and would sometimes guess correctly; thus, their score wouldn’t accurately reflect their knowledge.
a good strategy is to come up with the answer. And if your answer is one of the choices. Cross that out. Now you have a 50% chance of getting it right.
Rest easy, you have passed. I felt exactly the same way last year on my level 2–thought it was way too easy and there must be a bunch of traps I fell into. Last year, I had studied a lot (some would say overpreparation) and that must have been the strange feeling of not finding too many grey areas.
I just wish I could say the same about this year’s L3. Horrible AM paper, left nearly the equivalent of 2 questions blank and about two others with a one-liners written in a hurry at the end of on hail-mary type answers. The PM was fraught with areas I had had difficulties on or that I had left for the end (and I did not get to study in the entire last week because of family circumstances).
Either I know it, or I dont know it. Was a bit digital types!