@kennynarz
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Up3
Ive done 5 of the 6 Full Kaplan Mocks and plan on doing the last one this weekend, in addition to the 2014 CFAI Mock. That leaves the two CFAI Mock (vignette style) and the 2012 CFAI Morning exam for next weekend.
This thread has generated a lot of useful collaboration, I wanted to shift gears for a moment..
Is everybody timing themselves in the morning session?? I have been trying to stick to the strict tiing, and ive noticed that there is not much time to think in the AM Portion. You need to move through the questions at a good pace, and if you are stuck on one and need a couple minutes to think about the answer, your likely behind.
Whats everybody’s plan for potentially skipping questions to go back later and answer it at the end? I see a lot of places where people say they failed level 3 due to lack of time management in the AM section. I think my plan will be, if i KNOW that i cannot answer the question in the allotted time, and that if i spend more than a minute thinking and have nothing written down, that i am going to have to come back to it. Seems prudent to get the points you know you can get… Thoughts???
Up2I’ve taken 5 of the Morning Kaplan exams and I took the 2013 CFAI Morning exam. I agree that the CFAI was more straightforward. There seems to be a lot of ambiguity in the Kaplan exams along with implied assumptions that you (unbeknownst to me) are supposed to make. I think what Kaplan is doing is just trying to throw every possible situation at you just as preparation, to get you thinking on your feet. Good strategy by them. But the one CFAI was definitely more straightforward than the Kaplan in my opinion. Going to finish up the last Kaplan Exam this week and then do the 2014 and 2012 CFAI tests.
Up1I’ve also done all 6 Full Kaplan Mocks in addition to 2012 – present CFA Morning exams, and also the CFA AM and PM multiple choice Mocks. I did very bad ( like 10-15% worse than my average) on the Kaplan book 2 exam 2 afternoon session and it crushed my spirits at the time. Ive since gotten back on track and found it to be an outlier. Kaplan seems to throw everything at you including the kitchen sink so that on test day, there are no surprises. Well for me, that practice exam seemed to be mostly minutia and topics that I was cutting my losses on. On exam 3 i scored about 20% higher.
CFAI seem to be more straightforward in general, but I also agree that it tends to get wordy at time. What I am most concerned with on the morning part is knowing exactly what the question is looking for when they can be quite ambiguous. But overall, CFAI less ambiguous than Kaplan.
Nothing left from here on out but reviewing some notes and notecards and getting some good nights sleep.
….oh and hoping that they forget to print out the page with the GIPS questions
