venson

Re: Failed L3 - any suggestions?
Author: nycguy
Date:   Wednesday, August 13 @ 2:06 am

preacherman... my suggestions are:

1. Try to force yourself to complete the morning session questions. It's possible the questions you did not finish made the difference. What I did this year was to immediately look at all of the questions very quickly as soon as the exam began, and I did some relatively easy, small point questions first. These questions were near the end of the am question set and if people did not complete these, they missed easy points. I also tried to budget my time to no more than the number of points for each question. If you finish the am questions you can very easily add 20 or so points to your result. My feeling is the reason people don't finish is they spend too much time on the big portfolio management questions which are usually 1, 2 in the sequence.

2. On the portfolio management questions, you have to do a lot of practice questions from previous AIMR exams. Try to do some of these under the appropriate time pressure. As you do these, you should be able to develop an approach that allows you to quickly focus in on the most relevant info... underline this and keep reading. If you train yourself to work quickly, there is no reason you can't do ok on these questions. Anticipate that AIMR will develop questions designed to take you off track, and make answering some of the parts very difficult. Just try to stick to your battle plan, and if necessary make assumptions that allow you to show you know how to do this stuff. Also don't make the same mistake I did and assume there won't be an insurance company question. I spent very little time prepping for that and I really bombed that stuff.

I heard about a former AIMR grader who was available in NYC to specifically prep L3 candidates on essay questions. He was too expensive for me. You might check with Figov on this, I believe he will do it also.