Demoralizing Topic Tests

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bfry

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Heading into the home stretch I have the Live Mock from Schweser on Saturday and saved a topic test for each area on the CFAI site as a final review of each subject for the last week. My plan was to review my notes one last time and take a topic test - anything I get wrong review one last time.
However I have been hammering away on these topic tests and reviewing what I missed the last few weeks and have just been in a down trend. It seems the deeper you go on these topic tests the harder and more ambiguous the wording/questions get. My questions is are these even worth the time the last week? Should we be viewing these topic tests as “worst case” scenarios for the exam? Maybe getting some words of wisdom from those who have sat for the exam before would be nice as to the difficulty of these topic tests compared to the actual exam.
I guess we will find out in 10 days.
 
I am in the same situation - I feel like I have a solid handle on the majority of the material and know how to operate, but then surgery time comes and and every possible complication hits on the topic tests. This is especially my experience in the FRA section. I am hoping this is because they are trying to fit ALL of the procedures / learning objectives in just 14 example sets, and that on the exam it will not require as much.
 
Bfry, chin up bud. General theory floating around says that the CFAI topic tests and mock exams are harder than the actual exam. How true that is probably varies from year to year, but at least thinking (hoping) as much can help keep the anxiety level down. You don’t want to get stressed out or demoralized right now. Focus on using them to refresh your understanding of certain concepts and formulas, and not as a metric (score) for how well you’re doing or how well you may do on the exam.
Good luck!
 
i don’t think you can expect to improve much on a single pass of them all. 500 questions probably –> 400 concepts tested.
i’m with you. exact same experience. get a few 5/6s and then feel amazing on the next and find it’s 2/6.
i am planning to hit a number of them multiple times over the remaining days. i dont know if others have a better memory than me, but i find it hugely valuable to drill these things. i just did a currency swap this morning. spent like 7-8 hours doing just currency swaps back in March or so, and i got 10% of the way in and bailed. couldn’t keep track of anything. for me, hitting that 3-4 more times is mandatory if i want to be able to solve one in the exam (provided they ask it).
i think if you had an avg mock score pre-Topic Tests, then revised many or all of them thoroughly, then wrote 1 or more different mocks of the same calibre as the pre-TT mocks, that would be a better measure of growth.
 
Thanks for the advice guys!
I think you are right biuku. I may just be looking at each individual one with blinders on and that is giving me the mixed signals. Ill get some 5’s and 6’s on some and then totally bomb one by only getting 3 out of 6. If you take the average of all the topic tests for me it averages out to a decent score which I guess is how it is judged in the end. I guess that’s a lesson for all of us on exam day. You can totally bomb a few vignettes and still be okay - just keep chugging along and pick up 5’s and 6’s where you can to make up for it.
 
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