Practice Exams - what's a pass?

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cleverCFA

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For L1/L2, we were always targetting 70%+. What’s generally accepted as a pass for L3? Are AM and PM both equal in weight?
I took my first AM test yesterday. Haven’t sat down to score it yet, it’s all still a bit of a blur. Kinda annoying that we can’t just get a definite score, it’s all a bit subjective (that’s not what I said exactly, but it’s what I meant, I just didn’t really expand on it the way they did, etc).
 
so for level 3, the basic idea is you’re almost certainyl going to do worse on the AM. look at the past Level 3 scores, and you’ll see the same pattern.
The general rule is that you do your best on the AM, grab as many sure points as you can, and try to crush the PM section.
So in the AM, skip any questions that are stumping you. because you want to be writing all the time, grab all the low hanging points you know. because when multiple choice is gone, you can’t really “guess correctly” anymore.
 
Thanks Itera.
Looking at last year’s result thread, I can see what you mean. There’s some seriously ugly AM scores that passed.
http://www.analystforum.com/forums/cfa-forums/cfa-level-iii-forum/91324255
So 50%-60% AM and 80% PM or something along those lines is more typical than say 70%/70%? Is it generally accepted that MPS is similar to L1/L2 (65%ish I’m guessing) for overall score though given how poor AM scores seem to be?
I haven’t scored my AM but my guess is it’s somewhere in the 45%-55% range (though I took it cold so there’s heaps of points I missed out on easy general IPS format stuff that I should’ve been ready for but wasn’t)
 
Obviously just one person’s results, but I’ve scored myself into the low 50s% range on the 2 Schweser mock AM sections I’ve taken and PM had been 55-70%.
 
i would still aim for 70% overall for the so called “very unlikely to fail” level. sadly it looks quite difficult to do in the AM session. Definitely the PM session you must do decent
 
I’m aiming for 70% minimum on both papers but in reality I’d probably be happy with an am score in the 60’s and I wouldn’t be happy with a pm score below 80%.
1st practice exam scheduled for saturday but I don’t think the scores will be anywhere near that level yet.
I know a few people who passed last year that did loads of practice am papers, always scored >70% and always finsihed well within time. That didn’t translate to exam day though.
 
yes 70%+ is still viewed as guaranteed to pass. in reality its probably lower for L3 since the AM section removes the 1/3 chance of guessing correctly. Ideally, you want to do the best everywhere you can. shoot for 100% but yes it’ll probably even out to 60/80 to secure thr pass.
 
According to CFAI, 70% is guaranteed to pass. And as far as I know, the AM and PM are equal-weighted.
My advice: concentrate on just learning the material. Don’t “grade” yourself, don’t “time” yourself, and don’t worry about the nuances of the AM section. The time will come for focusing on AM, but not yet. Save that for May 15th.
At this point last year, I was still doing MC questions out of Schweser’s Q-Bank and CFAI’s EOC questions. I didn’t do any AM exams until the end of May.
 
when grading yourself, if you are unsure that you nailed the question give yourself partial credit and come back to review it later. thats a better approach than giving yourself full credit but not being sure if you fullly grasped the concept. i rather score low on the practice tests and pass the exam than score high on the practice tests and fail
 
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