Beatnik

I can't answer you directly because the institute would nail me on it, however I can share with you some general observations.

When I saw the kurtosis and skewness formulas in the text, I was struggling so hard that I wanted to quit the program. The quant instructor in my review class said he had not heard any reports that these calculations were on past exams. If you think about it, it would take so long to lay it out long-hand, that it couldn't be done in the allotted time, never mind the fact that you don't have enough space in your booklet to do it.

My experience going through lots of mock and practice exams (which were reasonable proxies for the actual exam) is that you need to understand the concepts of skew and kurtosis, but not the actual formulas.

Computational work is an important element of the exam, but understanding the underlying concepts is even more important.

praj Wrote:
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> Robert (or any of the previous exam takers), your
> thoughts on the following would be really
> appreciated.
>
> is it true that you don't need to know the formula
> (for example for kurtosis or skewness) if the LOS
> statements don't have the command word "calculate"
>
>
> Also does the actual CFA exam only ask questions
> relating to the LOS statements? The reason I ask
> is because I am using the CFAI texts as my primary
> learning tool (for readings) and they have so much
> information that is not mentioned in the LOS. Am i
> wasting time focusing on those concepts as well?
> For example I am currently reading about "Point
> Estimators & Confidence Intervals" the LOS only
> says "distinguish between point estimates and
> confidence intervals" it says nothing about the
> three desirable properties of estimators (which
> the texts talk about) Should I not worry much
> about concepts such as these?

- Robert