Nov 2010 Level I Pass Rate was 39.3%

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Lowest pass rate since 1997. Discuss.


http://www.garp.org/frm/overview/frm-facts/frm-statistics-and-charts.aspx

 

[Zack87]

Thanks for posting. I think it goes back to what David said in one of his webinars. That the questions are much more quantitative than what you would gather from the readings. I started doing practice problems a couple of weeks ago and man it was a rude awakening (especially Hull's chapters on interest rates, FRAs, and swaps). If you're like me, you'll say "there's no way the questions are going to be this hard on the test", but they probably will be. So I think that if you've read the study notes and watched the videos 2 or 3 times it's time to put those away and start doing problems!

 

[[email protected]]

I passed Level I in November, now preparing for Level II. Level I was brutal, I am not at all surprised by the low pass rate. It was also front loaded with long heavy math questions so that by the time you were done the first 20 you were already behind pace. Nothing was straightforward. Toughest exam i have ever taken.

 

[[email protected]]

Thank you for your feedback!
The heavy math questions were related to which section\topic ?
Do you have any advice ? I am currently preparing for Level I ...

Thank you again !

 

[Suzanne Evans]

Thank you for posting the passing rate. That makes me feel more confident about our bionicturtle.com preparation course, as our accumulated (2009 & 2010) passing rate is 62.4% based on our customer survey!

 

[[email protected]]

I passed level 1 in Nov and have the same sentiments about the exam. It was very front loaded. Every time I took a time check I was way behind schedule as the questions had many facets to them as well as loads of information that you had to decipher what was useful and what wasn't. The back end was much more straight forward with some layups but by the time you got there you had to fly through the questions so I am sure there were a lot of easy questions that were missed by many candidates due to time.

don't take anything for granted. David provides some great problems to work through. I skipped a few in my studies thinking there was no way that I needed to be able to do calculations this in depth and on exam day I was kicking myself for not working through them all.

 

[[email protected]]

For Level I I used Kaplan 100%. I did not use BT or the original texts. I am using BT together with Kaplan for Level II because of the feedback I heard about David's practice problems. The real exam was on a completely different level from the Kaplan practice exams. The thing that saved me was that I had worked though hundreds of Kaplan's practice problems and I did 3 timed 4 hour 100 question exam simulations. Besides just doing many questions, simulating the full pressure of the timed exam is critical. I have also worked in the industry for 10 years.

Even given the difficulty, I still think that reading all of the required texts is a waste of prep time unless you are working on this full time. Need to focus on concise notes (I still like Kaplan for that) and practice questions.

 

[braxxus]

I passed Level I in November, now preparing for Level II. Level I was brutal, I am not at all surprised by the low pass rate. It was also front loaded with long heavy math questions so that by the time you were done the first 20 you were already behind pace. Nothing was straightforward. Toughest exam i have ever taken.​

Yeah, it was the toughest exam I have ever taken as well. I would have rather taken the CFA Level I, II and III on consecutive days than retake that exam. There were a ton of questions that required heavy calculation. I am surprised that the Level II pass rate was so high, perhaps it was not as tough as the first level.

 

[[email protected]]

I think the level 2 pass rate makes sense. Level 1 weeds out those who did not put in the work, no-shows etc. Once you are through Level 1 you are much more vested in the program, as well as experienced in the material. Level 2 also seems more qualitative. In fact the level 2 pass rate is probably skewed by those who attempted to pass both in one go but only passed level 1 and failed level 2. The real rate for those who took level 2 after passing level 1 in May is likely higher.

 

[braxxus]

I also think the rate is possibly skewed in another way...you have the people who failed part 1 and would have failed part 2 as well, but part 2 wasn't graded as they failed the first part. It could be any number of reasons.

 

[[email protected]]

Got to assume if level 2 not graded due to level 1 fail, then it doesnt count toward pass rate. But who knows you might be right.


Point is this exam is brutal. Interested how it compares to CFA in terms of pure nasty difficulty level.

 

[braxxus]

It is much more difficult than any of the CFA Levels, I passed all three of those exams one after the other in the minimum time without feeling that any of the exams was half as difficult as the FRM Level 1.

Who knows what happens with the pass rate. The exam was hard.

 

[Peter van Vliet]

Thank you for posting the passing rate. That makes me feel more confident about our bionicturtle.com preparation course, as our accumulated (2009 & 2010) passing rate is 62.4% based on our customer survey!​

Suzanne what was the bionic turtle score rate on the last FRM level 1 exam ?
Thanks

 

[Peter van Vliet]

For Level I I used Kaplan 100%. I did not use BT or the original texts. I am using BT together with Kaplan for Level II because of the feedback I heard about David's practice problems. The real exam was on a completely different level from the Kaplan practice exams. The thing that saved me was that I had worked though hundreds of Kaplan's practice problems and I did 3 timed 4 hour 100 question exam simulations. Besides just doing many questions, simulating the full pressure of the timed exam is critical. I have also worked in the industry for 10 years.

Even given the difficulty, I still think that reading all of the required texts is a waste of prep time unless you are working on this full time. Need to focus on concise notes (I still like Kaplan for that) and practice questions.​

Thanks for the additional tips. On the kaplan testing, don't you find that the exam testing questions are a bit to straightforward/easy. Also the database is not that large and you start to recognise the questions, assuming your are referring to the web tool where you can simulate timed exams ?

 

[David Harper CFA FRM]

@Peter: re: Level 1 pass rates, in our two surveys (e.g., https://www.bionicturtle.com/_docspub/customersurvey2009/reports.html), we only asked a boolean "Did you pass?" so we actually don't have a L1/L2 breakout ... we probably should add that "feature" to the 2011 survey. Thanks for the your other comments, very interesting - Davd

 

[[email protected]]

Thanks for the additional tips. On the kaplan testing, don't you find that the exam testing questions are a bit to straightforward/easy. Also the database is not that large and you start to recognise the questions, assuming your are referring to the web tool where you can simulate timed exams ?​

I was referring to the Kaplan full 100 question practice exams - not the online question bank. I only used those as concept checkers after getting through a section. I used the 2 practice exams and 1 final exam as timed simulations. The real exam was still harder (although Kaplan made the "Final" exam pretty tough) but it still helped a great deal to simulate the 4 hour exam conditions.​

 

[Peter van Vliet]

Thanks,
Just one more questions, sorry for milking you on your past exam experience.
But can you maybe briefly (or extensively) give a bit more info the "extensive math" at last years exam. Just curious on what this is, particular topic or what suprised you on it. Maybe you can still remember what topics where particularly hard ?

 

[[email protected]]

The thing that suprised me was that it felt like every math based question had some sort twist on the standard calculation. Nothing was straightforward. Some questions had lots of words and info but were simple calcs. Some required you calc some other peice first before doing the primary calc. Many contained little tricks. The exam questions just felt different to all of the practice questions I had done (I did not use BT for part 1).

The material tested was as expected, nothing there was really suprising, it was just that the difficulty level was a full notch higher than what I had seen (using Kaplan's full practice exams + Qbank + old FRM exams).

I felt like if you put in the required work, you will pass. You will think its tough but you should pass. The exam will weed out anyone trying to half-ass it, and those who rote memorized formulas without understanding the concepts behind them.

And again, the exam was front loaded with long heavy math calculation problems that put you behind pace. I had heard this from past exams and it was true. Doing timed 100 question 4 hr exam simulations is critical to dealing with the time pressure.

 

[braxxus]

I agree with what he said in that the vast majority of the calculations were not straightforward and very time consuming. Perhaps i spent too long on 1 or 2 questions, but i finished the exam about 45 second before time was called. For all three levels of the CFA exam, I was done 30-60 minutes early.

Nothing tested was out of scope, but the calculations were defintely much harder than I expected. Some seemed more difficult than some of the challenge questions David had posted here on BT.