6 Tips To Guess Intelligently In the CFA Exams (& Tips to Avoid)

sometimes in numerical questions i purposefully do the wrong calculations to rule out an option. those kinds of questions come rarely but it has helped me in a few exams

Many questions have answers where the two distractors are each one step in the wrong direction, which may hint at the one in the middle (that shares one characteristic with each of the other two) being right. Obviously it doesn’t always work, but if you’re guessing, you’re stuck anyway, right?

Example:
a) buy x and sell y
b) buy x and buy y
c) sell x and buy y

Two answers have buy x, and two answers have buy y, so guess b. This can also help if you know one but not the other, so you can eliminate one choice (i.e., I know I need to buy x, but have no clue about y).

Thanks for this! Already used 1 or 2 of ’em during practice exams.

hmm I don’t think it really works that well….

Nope, it doesn’t. I tested this theory when i started doing practice exams. Varies every single time.

I don’t get #2. Thoughts?

@Alta12 it means that if 2 of the options are given are both indicating the same type of position they are both probably wrong.

For example a question ask which type of option has the largest delta and two of the options are deep-out-of-the money the in is probably safe to assume that the third option is the right answer.

Something I like to do to avoid circling the wrong answer is to write a short reason why the answer is wrong (sometime the reason is only a word). This forces me to consider all the options. I also cross out the option that is obviously incorrect. It helps, visually.

Many questions have answers where the two distractors are each one step in the wrong direction, which may hint at the one in the middle (that shares one characteristic with each of the other two) being right. Obviously it doesn’t always work, but if you’re guessing, you’re stuck anyway, right?

Example:
a) buy x and sell y
b) buy x and buy y
c) sell x and buy y

Two answers have buy x, and two answers have buy y, so guess b. This can also help if you know one but not the other, so you can eliminate one choice (i.e., I know I need to buy x, but have no clue about y).

I do the same thing if I am stuck in Mocks..it has worked for me many times 😀

@christine for some reason I get a lot of C’s that I get wrong. I mean for me personally whenever I am confused about a question and I end up choosing the wrong option, the correct answer is usually C. And no I am not saying choose C in doubt because I believe the same as you that the choices are pretty random.

If you choose the same letter (doesn’t matter if its a, b, or c) on all the questions you have no idea what the answer is, statistically speaking you should get 33% of all the ones you guessed.