The CFA Level I exam is 100% multiple choice questions, the morning and afternoon paper will each contain 120 questions.
You will be under time pressure in the exam and need to answer on average one question every 1½ minutes so you must keep moving through the questions. We recommend the following strategies:
1. There is a strong argument for working methodically through the questions in the order they are set but you might wish to start with a subject where you feel confident and which you can work through fairly quickly. But avoid hopping from one subject to
another, this will waste time and you may end up missing one section of questions out.
2. Don’t panic if you hit some difficult questions, you can probably get as many as 30 or 40 questions incorrect on each paper and still pass the exam.
3. Ethics in study session 1 is an important topic, if you are a marginal candidate your ethics score could be the deciding factor whether you pass the exam.
4. There is no penalty for getting an answer incorrect, so if you don’t know the answer eliminate any obviously wrong answers and guess which one is correct.
5. Mark questions in the exam booklet when you are not sure of the answer or where the calculation needs checking and come back to them when you have finished all the other questions.
6. Do not get distracted by a question that does not make sense, if the question turns out to be ambiguous then it will be excluded when it comes to grading the paper.
7. Read the questions carefully, particularly when there is a negative statement in the question.
8. Leave time to check your answers on the answer sheet, be careful you don’t miss answering a question and mark subsequent answers against the wrong question number on the answer sheet.
*** Make sure that ALL Questions contain an answer ***
Thank you for your help and your tips.
Can I help add this CFA question bank into your list of references as well?
The site provides free CFA questions which have proven useful to me and many others, and I think it will be highly relevant to add this to this article of yours, to benefit those that share our interest in CFA.
http://sites.google.com/site/cfaquestionbank/
One big problem is the lack of materials on CFA except for the few big names. I definitely would like to see more user guides and user reference materials to help everyone that is preparing for CFA.
Cheers!