Experiment with Schweser’s Q-Bank

I can comfortably say that I am sick and tired of studying and literally counting down the days when I don’t feel the need to study.

I had some free time so I wanted to measure in a very non-scientific experiment how certain conditions and questions difficulty would affect my score. So far I only did 3 session (60 questions each) with different parameters. What I wanted to identify my exceptionally weak areas that I should spend time on in the last two remaining weeks and what stress did to my mark.

Note: For each session I allocated myself an hour (to condense the time needed to do this, had I allocated myself the usual time it would have taken me a whole day to run through this).

Different conditions:

1. This was easy question and it took me 45 min to complete and I scored a 85% with economics and fra dragging my mark down.
2. This had questions with medium difficulty and was a highly stressed condition with excessive background noise and I was at the brink of physical exhaustion. I scored a dismal 63% with even ethics dragging down my mark (also economics and fra nothing surprising about that, corporate finance, equity, alternative investment, and portfolio management).
3. I repeated the last experiment again without the stress and my mark shot up to a 77% with quants, economics, corporate finance, and derivatives raining on my parade

Takeaway
Clearly I need to dedicated a lot of time to corporate finance and economics. I’d probably score better if I gave myself more time to think. Of course since I was using Schweser Q-bank the questions weren’t in item-set style format. I’m not sure how much the vignette style would impact my grade. If you are wondering why I hadn’t tried with an advance itemset it is mostly due to time constraints. And I’m not sure it is worth it since I know what my weaknesses are. Another important takeaway is the exceptional grade difference between the stressed and non-stressed condition. So sleep well before the exam. Eat well, go easy on the caffeine and don’t to anything that will stress you out.