How to Improve Your CFA Mock Exam Scores

Hi Christine! Thanks for the post! I am pretty much done with most of my mock exams. I ended up scoring a 74 in one of my Elan mock. But the score has been coming down now (the last I scored was a dismal 60)!! It is just about 10 days left, and I am just going to review my mocks!! Any suggestions you could give me on how to improve in the last few days? Also, The CFA mock exam does not replicate the actual CFA exam. It is more like timed questions that pop up on the screen one after the other. Is it worth giving it a shot? I am doing CFA practice assessments though!!

@Ankita‌ how annoying! Usually these platforms allow you to ‘mark a question’ and move on, perhaps this might help.

Reviewing definitely takes a lot more time than expected. I think at the start, I took a full day to review a 120-question mock. It speeds up as you get more familiar with topics and need to closely review less.

Hi @Ankita‌ 

If you’re out of mocks, keep redoing them, particularly questions that you have trouble with. I wouldn’t worry that scores go down sometimes – fluctuation is unavoidable. Focus on practice now, and in the last week focus on building confidence!

The CFA mock exam is always worth a shot. The types of questions are closest to what you’ll get in the exam. Were you not able to print out the CFA mock exam and take it that way?

Nope I could not 🙁 I called them up as well to ask. The person on the other end sounded a little clueless, but said the mock exam is not available in a PDF format. So when you go on the website, there are 6 assessments – AM session, PM session, and combined AM and PM session, 2 of this set. Once you click on a session, it directs you to a timed test, but fails to give you all questions at once section-wise. I found it very frustrating, especially because I never start with ethics, and give questions a skip in the first round if I don’t know them. But I think I’ll just do it, for practice sake!

Also, I take a lot of time to review. How much time should I be ideally spending on reviewing a 120 question mock?

i love this post, i actually asked this exact same question on the forums like two weeks ago!

I agree with all of these and only would add a corollary to #9 (Don’t make your exam open book). I think if you want to make your first mock exam open book, that’s totally fine. But it should be only if you a.) have more than a couple mocks to complete and thus have the resources for this gradualist approach and; b.) have the time to do this, as it is very time intensive. You’re looking at well beyond the 6 hours allotted for a timed exam, obviously.

I’d say only do it for the first one though, as you don’t want to burn precious mock exams on untimed, open book tests. That defeats the purpose of the mock exams, which is to replicate the real exam as much as possible.

Just my two-cents. Apply the appropriate discount rate.