Alternatives - bigger exam weight from now on? believe, bigger

dcfox83

The Alternatives section in this years Level II and Level III exams were more largely weighted than usual. Do you believe this is going to be an ongoing trend now or just a tweak in 2013 to catch retakers off guard.

bodhisattva

I’d be ready for anything, man. They could just as easily “flip” the weights and screw us on other topics like Derivatives or Fixed Income, for e.g.

anshultongia

very good question.  it would certainly make sense for a topic like alts to have an increased weighting.
for level 2, i knew for a fact that the topic weights for 7-8 years until 2012 had stayed the same so when i opened the 2013 pm paper i was surprised to say the least.  i see for 2014 they’ve rewritten part of the section that dropped an item set to make way for the extra alts one so maybe that section will get 2 again.
I imagine the Level 3 exam topic weights are more fluid than level 2 has been historically so i agree that we need to be ready for anything

RoastBeef

yes. we need to be ready for anything. level 2 topic weights are in a range anyway. We may see higher weights being assigned to topics which had lower weights earlier. like aether n bob said… be ready for anything.

LBriscoe

Whatever it is, they should increase the AI weights in the CFA exams, there is industry demand for AI knowledge.  Not to mention they should to be more competitive vs the Charter Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designation, which is gaining a great deal of traction and doing pretty well getting new candidates.  The CAIA is ALL private equity, hedge funds, commodities, real estate, futures…  The CFA exams does a crappy job at AI coverage and their embarrassing weightings.

Colum

Jeffsick this is public knowledge from exam results matrixs