To those who failed devoted, painful, addition, remember, 2010

BC_MBA_student

I remember getting Band 10 last year and seeing all the excited people on the forum talk about how thrilled they were with their scores. It was really painful for me, but I appreciated a retaker who passed taking the time to write a post giving some insight on what he did differently the second time around. As a retaker who passed this year, I want to do the same.

Things I did differently in 2010:

1. Get serious about ethics: In addition to sporadic questions during my studiing, I devoted two full days the last week before the exam on anything and everything CFAI-ethics related. This included the CFAI text, the questions in the text, and redoing all the ethics vignettes from mocks and samples.

2. End of Chapter Questions: I did this about 2-3 weeks before the exam, and it took me about 2-3 weeks to do. Very very helpful. While doing the questions, I could see questions that I remembered from the previous year's exam that I failed. The content, language, and difficulty level are very similar to the real thing.

3. Through NYSSA, I got set up with a free study group with people in my area. We met once a week for 2 hours. It's hard to say what tangible results this gave me, but at the very least it was nice to discuss other parts of the curriculum with people since you forget about them when you are doing your self study and are so involved in just the topics you are at that time covering.

4. I also bought the Schweser Video CDs but didn't have time to even crack them open. I think it would have helped for weak areas, so if you have time to do this it's worth a shot.


If you failed, forget it, start over in the winter and kill it next year. You can probably find more detailed "I passed and this is what I did posts" if you do a search from last year. The exam scores were results August 18th, 2009 last year.

Good luck.