People here are sharing too much information about exam , is that not a breach of exam privacy policy of GARP ? About the exam I feel it was difficult than the mocks I solved . Many questions involved lot of calculations ,and others are direct theory questions .
hi, does anyone know how the exam will be marked? i.e are the 100 questions equal weight or the harder calculation questions given more marks?
Each of the topics is WEIGHTED (T1 = 20%, T2 = 20%, T3 = 30%, T4 =30%) but you have a single final score (Y) which includes no penalties for incorrect answers (i.e., you should guess rather than leave a blank).
[*]The average of the Top 5% (I read this as NOT the 5th percentile but rather as the average of the top 5%). Call this value (T)
[*]GARP selects (calibrates) a ratio, presumably in part to control the overall passing ratio. So they set passing score (S) = Some percentage of (T). For example, maybe this passing score S = 70% * T(I just made up 70%, I have no idea about this ratio)
[*]You pass if your Y >= S
Technically, all of the exam material is copyrighted and cannot be shared publically without GARP’s permission, and candidates acknowledge this fact by signing the front cover of their exam books. We don’t want to see exact word-for-word replication of exam questions posted anywhere and ask that you take down from your forums anything that looks close to this (stem plus answer choices). General recollections of exam questions is fine and I believe a valuable resource for candidates (and exam prep providers!).
My guess is the passing score will be around ~70%, that seems the barrier for tests like these.
The exam was certainly harder than I anticipated. It was tougher than any of the three levels of the CFA program. Certainly not as wide, but deeper. And there were not as many 'easy' questions on this exam, and the more difficult questions required more steps. Now granted I didn't study as much as in the CFA program, but I doubt my view of the relative difficulty would change much. Now I screwed up somewhat because I couldnt' see the forest from the trees. Basically I got caught up in learning more about things that were more applicable to my job, as well as what I perceived as more important. So I definitely let out a little chuckle on the Kidder question. Certainly my bad.
My guess for my score: I was pretty darn sure on 50 of the questions, lets say I got 90% of those right. On 20 questions lets say I was pretty sure, but I could have made an error (rounding, stupid mistake, etc). Lets say I got 75% of those right. Now on another 20 questions or so, I probably narrowed it down to 2 answers and a good feeling on one of those, lets say I got 60% of those right. I know I missed 3 questions for sure. So for the remaining 7, lets say I could toss out a choice or I had an "educated" guess, lets say I got 35% of those right. That puts me right around 75%. As usual, it comes down to the guessing gods.
I mentioned roundings...GARP needs to do something to solve this. A good handful of times I was 'close' to the right answer and I was pretty sure it was due to rounding. However, it caused quite a bit of second guessing, re-checking, etc. IMO, in the era of calculators there is no need to do any rounding. Just store the bits of pieces of your question.
I think ur calculation is flawed - how can you calculate this on an absolute basis - what David and Aleks were talking about was in terms of percentile - i.e - taking a cut off the top 5% assume the top 5% figure came as 90 / 100 - so the benchmarks becomes 90 marks. Then GARP decides on the a specific X% off the top 5% - i.e X% off 5% - that X can be anywhere from 70% - 80%
Your approximation of 75% out of 100 in absoulute terms is too liberal
I easily got around 10 question wrong (maybe a few more) in my level 1 - and also missed out on attempting 3 questions - but still scored 1st quartile on all sections - how is that possible with the assumptions you made?
@Robert: thank you so much for your generous feedback. I shared it specifically with our new site consultant (as I think Q&A is the key to our future; and brief video). Thank you so much for taking your time to write a long post!
@rony_frm: I think the cutoff is currently unknowable to anyone. The cutoff will be some ratio (percentage) of the top 5%; i.e., not the 5% quantile itself but some ratio of it. (I always sort of liked this because it implies the exclusion of the likely tiny handful of extreme outliers who may have absolutely aced the exam). From the feedback I read (across multiple sources, not just BT forum), I perceive more "pain" than the average historical pain. So, anecdotally, 2012 May P1 feels like it was tougher than historical average. There is always headache/heartache about the difficulty, but it is sounding so far a notch more difficult this round (or, maybe social media is merely more amplifying, come to think of it?). I don't think GARP's methodology has changed, here is what i wrote in January about it, and why the "cutoff" is not currently knowable :
@aman241: In regard to "People here are sharing too much information about exam , is that not a breach of exam privacy policy of GARP?" Thank you for your support in our helping to maintain the ethics of the forum (I think that is a necessary ingredient to the overall quality).
It appears that, as usual, Aleskander is generally correct. I am awaiting permission from GARP to publish the full guideline, and as soon as possible, we will be vetting the extant threads to ensure compliance (i.e., my plan, if we see a complete "word-for-word replication [stem plus answers]" is to merely give a soft edit with minimal loss of meaning). Here is a snippet of the guidance I've received (I don't think Kristina will mind me sharing the essence):