Uhh…that was not fun. How did you find it?

Ya i agree on ethics but i dont want to mention anything about specifics but i think with Ethics, all of the questions but specifically the last batch of questions were annoying and too narrow of a focus imo (again cant list specifics but if you recall topic those questions tested youll get what i mean).  GIPS is also an annoying subject as you pointed out.  The Ethics questions seemed to point to very little infractions with relation to the question, so i answered almost everything accordingly (despite fact there may have been lots of infractions, i am just talking about question content).  I left those till end and breezed through the other content and then just gave my best guess at end on those questions cause really it didn’t seem clear cut the answers, at least based on knowledge i armed myself with going in.

mjrosen said:

I’m with most everyone else here. The morning section vs afternoon was like night and day. I’ve never come close to the time limit on any level and for the first time I found myself scrambling like crazy on the morning section. I guess I was writing too much. Even the mocks I didn’t take more than maybe 2.5 hours at most. I finished afternoon section in 90 minutes with a bathroom break. Think I’m going to need an 80+ on afternoon to make up for my 60- on the morning.

Ya that is like myself.  i enjoyed leaving early during level 1, level 2 and level 3 afternoon, but morning was just not reasonable imo.  11 sets of questions, i think 10 sets was already more than enough with a bit of inflation on the required minutes.  I did the written prior year exams in about 2.5 hours on average, so fact i would have needed 3.5 – 4 hours on this is a bit crazy.  The questions were not straightforward like the years before either.  On prior years there were a few questions i had to guess (1 for every 2 – 3 item sets) but this had one in almost every set i completed, plus some really time consuming calculations.  I think next year i just skip those and leave them till the end since there is no way on earth those take 5 or 6 minutes when there are 100 + keystrokes involved plus all the writing out of the numbers.

Well…for all my complaining i did well.  Afternoon saved me..pretty much in shock  
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Ya i am assuming 45-55 (with 55 being extremely unlikely, almost zero percent likely) on morning and 70-75 on afternoon…that doesn’t equal a pass unless i was on high end in both of those estimates + a low passing score this year.  If the test needs high 60’s then hats off to those who passed, cause i can’t imagine 50% of test takers getting high 60s.  The most frustrating part of leaving so much of the test blank was that i could have written in some random/light info and gotten partial marks (putting some numbers needed for calculation, or knowing the right choice but not going through any of the work to prove it).  I think that is the strategy next time for me, for any big questions where the answer or where the numbers are easy, just get that stuff down on paper and move on till end and come back if i have time.  Usually the answer is quite easy (buy, sell, dont buy, etc) but the work is a big time waster.  If the question one is 17 minutes i need to stop writing question one at 9:15 and have at least something written for every answer…yesterday i finished question one around 930 and didn’t even have an answer for one of the parts.  
And worse still i may have not even circled a template answer somewhere near end of test (was planning on coming back), there is no excuse for that.  

Not CFAI’s fault, but they need to rethink the time weighting per question, i am a portfolio manager in real life, and never have i had to write 3 hours straight (pen barely left the paper) and my job ended up a complete failure…it just has no connection to the real world, so i don’t get the extreme time constraint they placed on yesterday’s morning session.  If anything we are encouraged to spend extra time dealing with IPS, thinking about client constraints etc, nobody is sitting over us with a gun in real life asking us to not write a word more than needed.

And most of us never handwrite which makes it so challenging, this was like a speedrace where what you knew and how proficient you are isn’t rewarded in the morning, it is so backwards considering the afternoon portion which should be about speed could have been done in less than 2 hours if that was the time limit (i was at question 60 with 1.4 hours left to go…and just had about 11 questions to go back and review/complete).  I knew 80% of the answers to the morning session and probably got sub 50, that isn’t right (although i do get that i wrote too much and it should be penalized).

Ok done ranting, summary is that the morning session should be reviewed, too much emphasis on short answers (which they feel are necessary cause of language barriers and a young generation brought up without writing skills) and no reward for writing well crafted correctly written and supported answers…and in the real world it is the latter which is rewarded, you don’t do this job in point form! I was brought up and today work in an environment that rewards accuracy and rewards the correct process so this is not cool

Now that i think about it @edulima, i just noticed i have 70+ in ethics, i think that saved me, as i guessed on almost all of those.  I actually can’t believe i did 70+ with the ethics questions the institute decided to put on the test.