Tuesday, September 21, 2010

2011 CFA Level 2 Exam Topic Weight & Format

I realize while revising for 2010 CFA level 1 exam that it is important to know the topics to focus your time on.

So right at the start of the exam preparation, I went to CFA Institute website to find this information. This will help me allocate the right amount of time on each topic. The topics with heavier weights are Equity Investments & Financial Reporting and Analysis.

Topic Weight

TopicWeight

Ethical and Professional Standards10



Quantitative Methods5-10

Economics5-10

Financial Reporting and Analysis15-25





Corporate Finance5-15



Equity Investments20-30





Alternative Investments5-15

Fixed Income5-15



Derivatives5-15



Portfolio Management and Wealth Planning10



Exam Format
The format of the Level II CFA exam is also different from Level 1 (multiple choices). Level II CFA exam consists of 20 item sets — 10 on the morning session of the exam and 10 on the afternoon session.


Item sets are sometimes called “mini-cases.” Each item set on the CFA exam consists of a vignette (or case statement) and six multiple choice items (questions). The length of a vignette ranges from about 1 page to 2.5 pages. The longer vignettes are those that include several tables of information, such as for a financial statement analysis, statistics, or fixed-income item set. The average length of the vignettes on the exam is about 1.5 pages.

You will need to read the vignette before answering the items, and you will need to refer back to the vignette for information. The six items can be answered independently of each other, but they do require information in the vignette. 

On the Level II exam, you will have a total of 120 items (20 vignettes with 6 items each).

The Level II exam is graded for 360 points, corresponding to the number of minutes on the exam. The 120 Level II items are equally weighted, 3 points each, with no penalty for guessing.

No comments:

Post a Comment