I feel cheated out of an opportunity important, knowledge, concepts, before, better

studyn

I think the candidates take the exam more seriously than CFAI. I studied hard and I was hoping to demonstrate how well I know the important stuff. Instead, CFAI chose to ask AM questions that do not reveal who has mastered concepts but rather shows who can regurgitate trivia from the footnotes. What a stupid way to set an exam. I feel cheated - if I fail while X passes, I won’t feel that X has better knowledge of the fundamentals that I do.
I have taken tough exams before and I never felt this way. Usually they were difficult because of the complexity or the difficulty in bringing disparate ideas together. That would be perfect for Level III in CFA since it does tie all the different threads together in a few important areas - e.g. portfolio management, capital market expectations, strategic allocation and risk management.
Instead, CFAI concentrated on isolated crap that makes no difference in real life. Shame on them.

bcp901

Is is possible to pass without having answered one full question in the AM session. ? If there is sectional cuttoff separately in morning session, then i dont know how is that possible.
deeply worried.

bpdulog

Thanks Baystreet. That gives some hope. Fingers crossed.

AnalystForum

Conspiracy theory stuff -
does someone in CFAI have an ax to grind against Schweser and other “Cliff Notes” people? The poor Cliff Noters are going to emphasize the core portion of the curriculum, and CFAI does not want to pass candidates who don’t read their textbooks but read the Schweser Notes alone. That’s one reason why the AM paper was so obscure.
Next year, Schweser will try to include the trivia that showed up on this year’s paper and CFAI will keep one move ahead by setting a paper geared towards whatever Schweser did not think was important enough to include. So the Cliff Notes guys could never win.

Andreas42

OP, the alternative perspective is that there were some people that learnt the obscure things as well as the core concepts.  There are only two ways for CFA to measure this.  One would be to hold 20 x 6hr exams for each level so that you can be comprehensively assessed on all material.  Or hold 1 exam that includes a random assortment of concepts.  The fact that a few obscure things show up allow the people that REALLY know 100% of the material to distinguish themselves from those that know, say 90% of it.
It is frustrating though…  I’ve been there and feel your pain.

maratikus

The frustrating part is that, in real life, internalizing 90% of the material really well is far more important than knowing 100% of the material bookishly. I thought CFA was a practical exam, not so theoretical, but I was wrong. It’s not like finance is theoretical physics with their flights of fancy about superstrings. It’s the most practical subject that exists. Which is why the academic focus was jarring.
EDIT:
It’s not a bad idea to hold 5 3-hour exams and then they can test everything thoroughly; you won’t hear me whine about obscure material.

bulosehi

Maybe that’s the way they intend it - morning for obscure stuff, and evening for straightforward stuff..

IAmNeil

man… i can’t recall any AM questions already.

Analyze_This

So your issue isn’t that obscure stuff comes up in the exam - its that the obscure stuff shouldn’t be in the cfa material in the first place.  I think there is some merit in that argument.  I don’t think the exam should just focus on the ‘core’ concepts.  Because then people who took shortcuts (eg, schweser to name one) would be unfairly rewarded and those that painstakingly covered all of the ‘candidate body of knowledge’ as defined by CFAI would be unfairly punished.

former

Good point SFA, but.
Overall, my point is that CFAI should stop worrying about whom they are rewarding/punishing and focus on what they want candidates to truly know. So yeah, in theory they want us to know the whole CBOK including GIPS trivia. In reality, to help us be better analysts, they should concentrate on the bedrock concepts like portfolio management. A really good money manager could easily fail the AM exam, which is a pity.