Hello everyone,
With exam now behind us, I thought I'd share my experience, some of it can hopefully be of benefit to Suzanne and David at BT, and some of it to other Candidates. I know there's a more details review post, one I chose not to read (I don't know about you, but I really don't want to know what questions I did badly...; also, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we supposed to keep the questions to ourselves as per the Candidate Pledge?), my feedback is from a slightly different angle.
I don't know how others found it, I know I found the exam (level 2) really, really difficult. And I learned, I definitely put in the hours and combed through Kaplan’s textbooks. I had 2 sources of materials for Level 2: Kaplan and BT: Kaplan seemed a little more structured, and closely reflecting the underlying GARP books, so I went with it as my primary source. For Level 1 I bought GARP’s materials, and I considered them somewhat haphazardly aggregated from underlying textbooks, I hoped that Kaplan would stick to the curriculum while providing a layer of explanation and “unification” to the underlying materials. The reason I didn’t choose BT as my primary materials is embarrassingly simple: they are way, way more difficult; I simply assumed that Kaplan gauged the level of difficulty more-less accurately. Another reason is that Kaplan has hundreds of on-line questions, and BT does not. Anyhoo… I did a lot of test quizzes on Kaplan Online prior to the exam, and always scored around 70%, so I thought I was quite well prepared, I did the 20 questions from the most recent exam published by GARP (doing any earlier papers didn't seem to make much sense to me, given turnaround of material), I scored 85% on that, that made me feel real good... then I did Kaplan's 2 mock exams. Now this was interesting - the mocks were noticeably more difficult than on-line questions, still I did in mid-to-upper sixties, which should generally be enough I think. Then came the exam... and it was really difficult nonetheless. I don't know to what extent stress played a role (having failed CFA level 2 in June was a big blow to my confidence), but I know the exam seemed much more difficult than any prep material (with the exception of Bionic Turtle - your materials are famously on the more difficult end of the scale, and so are the test questions, which is exactly why I skipped them, I thought that you’re exaggerating a little bit, and that may have been a mistake, I think BT's level of difficulty was quite close to the actual exam). I also know it wasn't an entirely subjective impression - normally I would do a full mock in around 2.5hrs, but with the actual exam the 4hrs I had wasn't a minute too many. One thing I noticed and had mixed feelings about was the over- (in my opinion) representation of regulation-related questions. I think that "what is the best practice regarding...?" type of question is quite open, and much more difficult to constrain in a), b), c) or d) choice than "what is the 99% VaR?". I appreciate that not all the questions can (nor should) be “plug and chug”, but I think regulation questions come with a potential for ambiguity, which should be carefully managed.
So these are my impressions… what are Yours?
Kind regards,
Wojtek Buczynski
With exam now behind us, I thought I'd share my experience, some of it can hopefully be of benefit to Suzanne and David at BT, and some of it to other Candidates. I know there's a more details review post, one I chose not to read (I don't know about you, but I really don't want to know what questions I did badly...; also, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we supposed to keep the questions to ourselves as per the Candidate Pledge?), my feedback is from a slightly different angle.
I don't know how others found it, I know I found the exam (level 2) really, really difficult. And I learned, I definitely put in the hours and combed through Kaplan’s textbooks. I had 2 sources of materials for Level 2: Kaplan and BT: Kaplan seemed a little more structured, and closely reflecting the underlying GARP books, so I went with it as my primary source. For Level 1 I bought GARP’s materials, and I considered them somewhat haphazardly aggregated from underlying textbooks, I hoped that Kaplan would stick to the curriculum while providing a layer of explanation and “unification” to the underlying materials. The reason I didn’t choose BT as my primary materials is embarrassingly simple: they are way, way more difficult; I simply assumed that Kaplan gauged the level of difficulty more-less accurately. Another reason is that Kaplan has hundreds of on-line questions, and BT does not. Anyhoo… I did a lot of test quizzes on Kaplan Online prior to the exam, and always scored around 70%, so I thought I was quite well prepared, I did the 20 questions from the most recent exam published by GARP (doing any earlier papers didn't seem to make much sense to me, given turnaround of material), I scored 85% on that, that made me feel real good... then I did Kaplan's 2 mock exams. Now this was interesting - the mocks were noticeably more difficult than on-line questions, still I did in mid-to-upper sixties, which should generally be enough I think. Then came the exam... and it was really difficult nonetheless. I don't know to what extent stress played a role (having failed CFA level 2 in June was a big blow to my confidence), but I know the exam seemed much more difficult than any prep material (with the exception of Bionic Turtle - your materials are famously on the more difficult end of the scale, and so are the test questions, which is exactly why I skipped them, I thought that you’re exaggerating a little bit, and that may have been a mistake, I think BT's level of difficulty was quite close to the actual exam). I also know it wasn't an entirely subjective impression - normally I would do a full mock in around 2.5hrs, but with the actual exam the 4hrs I had wasn't a minute too many. One thing I noticed and had mixed feelings about was the over- (in my opinion) representation of regulation-related questions. I think that "what is the best practice regarding...?" type of question is quite open, and much more difficult to constrain in a), b), c) or d) choice than "what is the 99% VaR?". I appreciate that not all the questions can (nor should) be “plug and chug”, but I think regulation questions come with a potential for ambiguity, which should be carefully managed.
So these are my impressions… what are Yours?
Kind regards,
Wojtek Buczynski
