CFA Practice Pack: A Comprehensive Review

In the recent years CFA Institute has revised many long-standing aspects of the CFA exam – the shift to computer-based testing, multiple testing sessions in a year, and changes to results reporting.

Their latest initiative is the CFA Institute Practice Pack – a package of mocks and practice questions made available to CFA Level 1 May 2024 candidates since their registration opened in August. Currently, the CFA Practice Pack is only available to Level 1 candidates.

What is CFA Institute’s Practice Pack?

CFA Institute’s Practice Pack is an additional, optional purchase currently offered to CFA Level 1 candidates for $299 (Level 2 is available from May 2025 onwards). With the Practice Pack, you get:

• 5 practice mock exams
• One exam-simulation mock exam
• 1,000+ practice questions
• Downloadable CFA curriculum as PDFs or eBook format

These mock exams and practice questions will be in addition to the standard mocks and practice questions you get with your exam registration.

5 exam-quality mock exams

With the Practice Pack, you get five additional ‘exam-quality’ mock exams, and one exam-simulation mock exam delivered via the Prometric interface, just like exam day.

One of the most consistent advice we’ve always given candidates is to always make sure you attempt your free CFA Institute mock. Not only because it’s already included in your exam fee, but because CFA Institute mocks would be the closest thing to the actual exam as you’re going to get.

So getting 6 more mocks would be getting a lot of high-quality practice. CFA Institute has given us access to these mocks to thoroughly test. We’ve included our walkthrough, review and thoughts below.

CFA Institute have assured us that these mock exams mimic the difficulty, length and topics of the actual CFA exam. The questions are created through the same processes and same people who write the actual CFA exam questions.

In fact, we learnt that even the questions writers aren’t aware, when writing the questions, whether the specific questions they’re writing will end up in the Practice Pack or the actual exam!

Once you purchase the Practice Pack, the 5 additional mock exams will appear in the ‘Mock Exams’ tab of your CFA Digital Learning Ecosystem.

When you’re ready to take a mock exam, just click through the mock you’ve chosen. Each mock has 90 multiple-choice questions. It’s a timed mock, and you have 2 hours 15 minutes to complete the exam.

If you’re stumped, questions can be skipped to be answered later. If you’re unsure about a particular answer, you can also mark it to be reviewed later.

You can also mark your questions with a confidence level (low, medium, high) as you go along. They don’t affect your answers or score, but they’re useful to refer to when reviewing your questions and answers.

How difficult are Practice Pack’s mock exam questions? Feedback from candidates is that the difficulty is about average, or slightly above average. Some candidates find the mocks consistently easier, and some find it more difficult. I believe whether or not you find it easier or harder depends on your study style and how you understand the CFA curriculum.

My own observation is that from the perspective of testable material, the CFA Institute mock exams tend to test a wider range of material, so you might get some left-field questions to which you may not have remember studying about.

But on the whole, I found that I needed less time to answer CFA Institute mock exam questions compared to third-party providers.

When you’re happy with your answers, you can submit your answers. Upon finalizing and submitting your answers, you’ll immediately get a score in the next screen. You can then proceed to review your answers as well.

You can review each question individually – in the review screen you’re given:

• The question
• Answer options
• The correct solution + reason why the answer is correct
• The incorrect answer options + reasons why those are incorrect
• Your confidence level that you marked for this question

This is a great, comprehensive review option, allowing the user to review the question and learn thoroughly from it. The review screen from the Prometric Exam Day Simulation mock was significantly different.

Prometric exam day simulation mock exam: Where to get this exam-day experience, and what we thought of it

In addition to the 5 practice mock exams, you also get an exam-accurate mock, delivered via Prometric – the exact exam software you use on exam day. The theory is that you’ll be able to take a dry-run that’s as close to CFA exam day as possible.

You’ll receive grading and feedback by topic area immediately after completing the exam – an advantage over the actual exam day!

The Prometric exam day simulation mock is accessed separately from the other five mocks. To access the exam day simulation mock, navigate to:

My Account > Study Tools > CFA Program Practice Pack > Exam Day Mock Exam Experience

When you click through and confirm your details, you’re immediately launched into the Prometric exam interface. This is identical to what you’ll be seeing on the actual exam day. After reading through the exam instructions and a short demo of the interface, you’ll be able to click ‘Start the Test’ and the Prometric mock will begin.

Again, this will be exactly the same as what you’ll be getting on exam day, so once you start the test, you have to complete it! I wouldn’t get too stressed out about it though – you’re allowed as many re-attempts as you need.

Just like the actual exam interface, you can move back and forth between questions and flag questions for later review. After completing the test and submitting your answers, you’ll immediately get a grade and a ‘score report’.

The score report shows up after you’ve finished your mock exam. This shows all the correct answers, as well as your answers. Clicking on the individual answers would bring you back to the question itself in the mock exam interface, allowing you to review the question and all answer options.

Unlike the ‘regular’ mocks in the Practice Pack, there wasn’t any detailed answers included in the score report.

The score report is also only accessible the one time, and immediately after the mock. You can’t review your scores later – if you logged into the Prometric mock later, it’ll just prompt you to take the exam again.

Despite the shortcomings, which I hope will be addressed in future development, overall this provided an invaluable trial run of the actual exam.

1,000 exam quality CFA practice questions: How to get them, and what we thought

So far, with the CFA Practice Pack we’ve looked at five regular mock exams and one Prometric platform mock exam, totalling 900 questions.

But with the Practice Pack there’s more – 1,000 additional practice questions, which you can access through the Practice tab in the CFA Digital Learning Ecosystem.

When you click through to the Practice tab in the CFA Digital Learning Ecosystem, candidates will see their usual practice questions by topic area and reading. If you’ve purchased the Practice Pack, you’ll be able to see an additional item under every topic area showing additional questions.

For example, with the Practice Pack purchased, there would be an additional item under Quantitative Methods labelled Quantitative Methods: Practice Pack, under Economics there would be an item labelled Economics: Practice Pack, and so on.

The additional questions add up to exactly 1,000, representing more than a 60% increase in practice questions compared to the standard questions included with exam registration. Practice Pack questions in each topic area roughly matches the weightings used in the actual exam, so you’ll get proportionate practice.

What about the quality of the practice questions? Again, these questions are created through the same processes as the actual exam questions, so these would represent practice that’s closest to actual CFA exam questions in terms of format and difficulty.

How difficult did we find it? My personal experience of the questions was that the difficulty was quite varied. Some questions were quite straightforward, but that also mean that I would either know the answer outright, or completely have no clue. I found the questions to be less tricky compared to most third-party providers.

The questions felt similar to the mocks, but obviously this would be different if it was Level 2 or Level 3, since the mocks would be based around vignettes rather than stand-alone questions.

Access to Level I curriculum PDF files

All candidates have access to the curriculum, but to download it, CFA Institute offers them separately for USD49 in downloadable format.

However, when you purchase the Practice Pack, you get this downloadable access included with the purchase price.

To access the downloadable curriculum, navigate to:

My Account > Study Tools > CFA Program Practice Pack > Downloadable Curriculum

When you click through, you’ll be able to access the curriculum books, prerequisite readings and glossaries in PDF and eBook format.

CFA Practice Pack: Pricing

The CFA Institute Practice Pack is offered at USD299, although this might change in the future. You can check the latest pricing here.

Is it good value?

USD299 for 6 mock exams and 1,000 practice questions is pretty great value.

However, this being CFA Institute, the natural question would always be whether this could have been included as part of the exam registration fee. We put this question to CFA Institute, who responded that while that does have a logic to it, producing this extra material does come at extra cost. The realistic options for CFA Institute would be:

1. Charge for the Practice Pack
2. Include it with the exam registration fee but raise the registration fee
3. Scrap the project altogether and not offer it at all

Option 2 would basically make the ‘purchase’ of the Practice Pack compulsory for all candidates, and Option 3 would mean those who would want the Practice Pack would miss out.

Opinions on this? Or suggestions for CFA Institute? Let us know in the comments below.

CFA Institute Practice Pack: Pros and cons

Pros

• Lots of questions – 6 mocks and 1,000 practice questions
• Exam-accurate in quality and difficulty
• Exam-accurate Prometric interface available
• Very thorough mock exam answer review

Cons

• Prometric mock grading does not allow easy review of questions and answers
• Practice questions only accessible by topic (unable to create custom tests like say a question bank)

Our conclusion

CFA Institute has created a compelling practice package of mocks and questions that are as exam-accurate as possible. Although not included with the exam fee, the USD299 price is pretty reasonable for what you get.

Frequently asked questions

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Hope you found the guide above useful! For more info, check out CFA Institute’s Practice Pack here.