FRM Part I Exam on November 21st 2015

[Numerical Wizard]

I have opened this thread to share impressions and feedback on today's FRM part I exam.

 

[Maged]

Hi All,



I have a few comments that could help others when reading this post later.

Exam
Exam was really tough even more than expected. Questions were very tricky and need deep understanding. A lot of questions were about VaR Expected shortfall. Nothing was about BSM except one 1 question as I guess. (Please note that I only checked Qs from 1 to 90) & then time was over.

Deep understanding is required for all topics even light topics that you could never imagine that they will do some tricks, they did !!

For example, there was a question about confidence interval and how to be mapped to another interval using some different parameters. At the end you will do it, put not in 2.4 minutes as you should.


Testing Location
I had my test in Dubai. Exam didn’t start on time. Some candidates were entering after 8:00 and exam started on 8:17 AM. Testing location was not well organized and proctors were talking with each others. I asked them once to lower their voice.

I noticed 3 different colors of testing books (Blue/ Greed/ Red) and I’m sure what the difference between them.


Material
I used Schweser and I could claim that it did 80% of covering the exam. There is nothing in Schweser about VaR expected shortfall while the exam was full of it.
I’m not sure about BT status of covering it.

At the end, I'm wondering if GARP is providing such hard exams, why there is no more practice questions and previous exams like CFA. Is preventing such support could be considered as additional factor in making FRM more hard!
I believe that GARP should provide better support to all candidates to help them practicing the exam not just to leave us with only 25 questions!.

 

[S666]

I'm sorry but I really have to disagree with the above, I found the exam to be much easier than I was expecting and a definite notch or two below Bionic Turtle's practice questions.

I felt that the answers to most of the qualitative questions were blindingly obvious (bar about 2-3 of them) and the quantitative questions required nothing more than a basic grasp of the concepts being tested. I was expecting a much, much harder exam.

I was one of the probable few who had access to both Schweser and Bionic Turtle study material. I could well believe that if I had used solely Schweser for study I would have had a bit of a tougher time of it this morning. I found the Bionic Turtle material (especially the large quantity of top quality practice questions) to be a great representation of the type of topics and questions asked on the real exam....albeit the exam questions were easier.

I would go so far as to say that the Bionic Turtle practice questions are about 90% responsible for preparing me so well for the exam.

I finished the exam with about 40 minutes to spare which gave me ample time to check the 3 questions I had been unsure of on the first run through.

I timed my study time to the hour and spent 232 hours studying in total, for what it's worth.

With regard to the different coloured exam booklets I noticed that the FRM exam was a blue booklet and the ERP exam was a red booklet....both exams were being administered in the same room and were laid out in alternating rows of candidates taking each different exam.

 

[tony mouse]

Bionic Turtle was an excellent preparation, and yes, the questions were somewhat easier than expected. Big focus on VaR and ES. I have spent probably too much time during the preparation reading the books and not enough on practice questions. For some questions, especially the quantitative questions, I thus knew more or less how to answer but with time pressure I failed to answer correctly quite of few of them. I think that on average I did well, and if I haven't, the second try will definitely do… I have no idea about how many questions should be answered right to pass and this could well be dependent on how the other performed - and not all have Bionic Turtle preparation materials! If some candidates chose Schweser to prepare the exam, this forum is probably the wrong place to complain about the difficulty of the exam. Honestly, it was quite long but not difficult. And we didn't have to know so many formulas, it was almost frustrating not to have to apply a lot of those I knew, and that David warned about in his videos. It often was all about the logic behind the formula, which also makes more sense to test.
In Zurich, Switzerland where I took the exam one third of the candidates hasn't even shown up. I can't wait the result on January 5th, GARP needs far too much time to decrypt their standardised answer sheet and provide results.

 

[Nicole Seaman]

We also created a forum thread to discuss both parts of the FRM exam so we can keep all comments together. You can view the Part 1 forum thread here: https://forum.bionicturtle.com/threads/november-2015-part-1-frm-exam-feedback.9164/unread