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.
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!
If we fill out the form, do we get access only to Dec 2018 results or also to June 2018 L2 results?
Hi Magnus! When you fill out the form, you’ll immediately get an analysis of your own results delivered to your inbox. The reports and aggregated data take a while to collect and analyse so they’re available separately. (http://www.300hours.com/cfa-results-analysis.html) You can also gather most of the data from our blog posts. (http://www.300hours.com/view-all-posts.html) Hope that helps! Chris