CFA Level I Dec 2012 Results: How to Get Your Results Analyzed on Results Day

If you sat for the CFA Level I last December, you’re probably feeling a bit nervous.

For good reason: the results to the Dec 2012 CFA Level I will be released next week.

If you’ve read our results FAQ post, you’ll also know that the CFA Institute doesn’t release your exact results. You get a rough breakdown of how you did – topic-by-topic, you’re allocated one of three ‘grades’: <=50%, 51%-70%, or >70%.

Hardly that satisfying. That’s where we come in.

For long-time readers of the blog, you’ll know that we have an Analyze Results section. This section allows candidates to automatically analyze their results breakdown – just enter your results as given to you by the CFA Institute email. Based on your input, we’ll calculate your 40/60/80 score, as well as your theoretical maximum and minimum scores.

What is a 40/60/80 score? 
Over the years, candidates devised a calculation rule-of-thumb to very roughly estimate their ballpark score – the 40/60/80 rule. As the CFA Institute breaks your results down by topic & weighting, and gives you a categorization of your score (less than 50%, 51% to 70%, more than 70%), the 40/60/80 rule roughly estimates your score with this methodology:

• If categorization is less than 50%, assign an average score of 40%
• If categorization is 51% to 70%, assign an average score of 60%
• If categorization is more than 70%, assign an average score of 80%

As you obtain the average scores, multiply them by the topic weightings and sum them up to finally obtain your estimated score. As you can see, the rough estimate is exactly that – very, very rough.

Note: The exact 40/60/80 weighting can be changed to be more accurate depending on the topic (and is done so in our Analyze Results section). For example, for a topic in Level II or III that has 18 points, this means it comprises of one item set of 6 questions. This means that the 51%-70% category can only consist of one solution: 4 correct answers out of 6, or 66.7%. In this case, 66.7% instead of 60% should be applied (if you want to be as accurate as possible). But for convention,  we will always refer to this score as the ’40/60/80 score’ even though our calculation tools will incorporate the more accurate methodology.

With your help, we can take analysis a few steps further.
Besides that, given enough data points, we can take this further. For example, we deduced that the minimum pass score for CFA Level I June 2012 was 64%. That was the score to beat for the June 2012 exam, and we hope to deduce the equivalent for the Dec 2012 exam.

We’ve added work experience and education background as additional questions the Analyze Results section. With enough of your help, this will help us answer the importance of a finance-related education or work experience in passing the CFA exams.

We’re pretty excited to dig into the data from December 2012! If you’re expecting your results next week, be sure to get your results breakdown in our Analyze Results section. Good luck!

Pass the word on to a friend that’s also expecting results next week – the more results we have, the better our analysis will be!