Will there be similar questions year after year?

[maisatomai]

For CFA exam, they will sure be some popular questions that appear year after year. For FRM, is there a trend?

If there is, I think studying the past year questions will sure help a lot.

1) Is real past year exam released for FRM?
2) Is practice questions released by GARP reflective of the real examination in terms of difficulty and depth?

 

[David Harper CFA FRM]

Hi maisatomai,

The FRM is not as predictable (nor as mature, methodologically, a fact which GARP has acknowledged) as the CFA. But, more so in Part 1, there are themes and questions that have a precedent. Due to the mixed reality my view is:

• Recent questions are useful (say, 2008 or 2009 or later)
• However, earlier questions are not. Many of the earlier questions are irrelevant or, in some cases, have be trumped with more precision. My favorite example is that pre-2008 questions tended to make the candidate assume that a 10-year coupon-bearing bond will have a duration of ~ 7 (or, similarly, that a a call option will tend to have a delta of 0.5). In the current FRM, GARP will never repeat that imprecision, as a current candidate knows that duration varies with coupon rate (or that call option delta varies).

1) No, GARP has never released whole exams. They only "leak" them out à la carte, primarily in the handbook
2) It varies, but this year, like last year's is clearly NOT representative in terms of breadth (it contains a few selected concentrations and leaves out the majority) while it seems to me about right in terms of degree of difficulty.

I hope that helps, thanks,