Any feed back on FRM 2009 exam from candidates from Far East Cities like Auckland, Melbourne, etc., ?

From Singapore,

I feel AM was a shock to me, way too many qualitative and wordy questions
wasnt really prepared for tat.. realised that market risk, and credit risk has very minimal portion in this paper
rushed to finish in the last 30min

PM was more do-able however, long wordy questions took up much of my time..
Overall, i don think i can make the mark due to AM paper…

david..

Just returned from the exam. Full (chennai, India)

first half was not that comfortable . Too much narrative that ate precious time. Second half a smooth sail. Overall Hmm .. if second compensates and if I am lucky then….

Qn distribution was failry ok in both session. hull and vaR occupied prime areas. Latest topics on crisis also were prominent.

A good (Bad?) experience.

hoping for the best.

regards
venkat

Hi all,

      I have the same feeling towards the Full exam - morning session here in Singapore - overweight on wordy questions that makes me have to rush for almost last 30 questions within 30 minutes…

      I feel RELATIVELY at ease when doing the afternoon session.

      I hope my afternoon performance can make up for my morning one…. Keep fingers crossed.

Cheers
Liming

Hi,

Wrote the full exam FRM 2009…

The 1st half was really a complete messy ... with questions .... very less problems….. questions which were quite complicated…

i am definitely going to fail…...

however reluctantly the 2nd half was good… with some sitters , also some wrong questions like the question on bushels….

so, i am confused…
anyways, i am mentally prepared , so starting for preparing for level 1 from tom…..

DAVID PLEASE ADVISE HOW GARP WOULD BE EVALUATIING THE QUESTION PAPER ?

bye and all the best..

prem…

Thanks for updates, please keep them coming (please note: the FRM makes almost everybody “feel” like they failed; many have perceived they failed coming out of the exam, but passed anyway). @prem: GARP says they take the top 5th quantile (i.e., whatever score cutoffs the top 5th “percentile”), then they take a ratio (e.g., 0.75) of that top score.  I personally suspect the ratio (0.X of top 5%) is calibrated after the results are tabulated to approximate a ~50% pass result; or, best case, they use .75 of top 5% (e.g., if 0.75* top 5% only passes a small % due to high difficulty, I doubt they would keep it). 

But, either way, it’s really based on an (ex post) “grading on a curve” (no segmentation by section/topic, all questions weigh equally)...therefore:  I do not think you can divine anything useful from the method. Unfortunately, it’s a waiting game - David

same here in istanbul..

wrote the full..ad fully raped by the morning section..

i felt like i had not enough time to read the questions thoroughly..

however, i do not believe that top 5% of test takes would do better than 90%..

what do you guys think?

I’ve just finished the level 1 exams. I found them both quite hard - but mainly because of the time constraints. I found that there were very few questions that could be read and “digested” in less than a minute. This problem was, in a few cases, made worse by what I thought was poor use of grammar. The end result was that I felt I was often rushed in my execution of a calculation or thought process.

On a separate point, I did notice that almost all of the questions requiring a numerical answer asked you to choose from valued based on whichever was the “nearest” or “closest”. I understand that this is bacause they have to allow for the fact that some people will be carrying over rounding errors during the calculation… But to then quote these answers with multiple decimal places seems to go against the intuition behind accepting the fact that there will be rounding errors in some candidates answers! In one case three of the answers were different only by their 5th sifgificant place (eg 3433.78 and 3433.89)!

@john, that is very interesting.

Re: 3433.78 and 3433.89, I must assume those are both incorrect (false) answers? To agree with your point, no financial exam ever, anywhere, would place the correct answer so near to an incorrect answer…unless that is a gross mistake by GARP, that looks like a good way to identify two false answers…David

I took the full exam in Singapore too.  GARP held it at the Grand Hall of SIM University in Singapore so my take is that there were around 500-600 people taking Full exam alone - not any close to the CFA exam last June at Expo of 5000.

The questions were difficult and lengthy. You need roughly 90 seconds for a typical CFA L1 exam but you may easily spend 5 minutes on a single FRM questions! They are well-spread across all topic. The problem is that given the breadth of the FRM curriculum I think it was impossible for the examiner to test on everything. So there are just one or two question on each topics so you feel your effort spent on reading, for example, the UBS report a bit wasted. Maybe that’s part of the reason why they want to split it into 2 levels.

I personally didn’t feel that great walking out of the exam hall because I thought I made too many guesses. I think I’m getting around 60-70%. Hope I’ll clear the cut-off line…

hi
same here I took the full exam here in Zurich; morning session was nightmare, very difficult. However I found that some questions as someone already mentioned above e.g. with forward price for some bushes with storage cost, you could never get the answer which was provided.
In the morning session you need more than a min to read just question.
so I hope that all my guesses in the morning get some good results
regards
siamak

...........reporting from Nigeria…..Africa

Whao!...some test.For those that can walk out of the test and beat their chest they will pass..Kudos to you.

.....‘can’t say for now…i just hope for the best.The morning session was tough, the afternoon a lot better.Overall it should be positive.
David thanks a lot for the materials…..

Got back from Level 1 in NYC…

My impression of the exam:  fair.  Level of difficulty I expected, although there are one or two questions (#40 PM) that were over-the-top crazy hard, unless you’re a PhD quant.

GARP made two typos, one was minor.  In the AM, there were two ii.‘s listed… i ii ii iv instead of i ii iii iv.  The other was major - #29 on the PM - the three states of the economy, three states of the how a stock would do (increase, decrease, subtract the two to get neutral).  The question gives three scenarios and the third left out if the second part the % whether it was a decrease or the same.  This mattered to the answer.  I had to assume the third was “neutral” state vs. “negative” to get to an answer.

I’m borderline.  The way I “grade” my exam is a put a mark next to the question if I’m not 100% sure I’m right.  Those that I don’t question I get about 90% right (because I screw up something like misreading it) and ones I question I get about 40% right.  I questioned 30 on the exam, so I’m sitting somewhere around 75%.

BTW - Just like in the CFA, they should put all of the fail scores in deciles (1 - 10) so if you fail, you know how close you were.

Hi David,

Reporting from Toronto Ontario for the Full exam

The morning session was really crazy! But the afternoon was definitely better, not much calculate this, calculate that!

But there are some interesting question that stuck to my mind. We   were given all the inputs necessary to derive put-call party in BSM and were asked to derive risk free rate!

Interesting huh!  Only time will tell whether it is skill or luck!

Concepts

David Harper, CFA, FRM, CIPM - 21 November 2009 09:45 AM

@john, that is very interesting.

Re: 3433.78 and 3433.89, I must assume those are both incorrect (false) answers? To agree with your point, no financial exam ever, anywhere, would place the correct answer so near to an incorrect answer…unless that is a gross mistake by GARP, that looks like a good way to identify two false answers…David

Actually I think one of them is a correct answer.

One of the things I’ve noticed with FRM answers (vs. the CFA) is that often you can get to an answer without knowing the exact equation, using some common sense.  One example is there was an FRA question.  I forgot the exact equation (but was close) and my knowledge of FRA’s are choppy, but here are some of the facts from what I remember.

1.  Entity enters into FRA, receive annualized 5.5% on a (monthly?) basis on $1M for 3 months (6-9 months in the future)
2.  Interest rates rise.

You know that the value of the FRA to the entity is negative (eliminates two answers), and to the degree (elimiates the third).  The two negative answers were something far apart, like -800 and -80,000, so the “-800” answer looked correct, just based on the cash flows

There was also another one - the ” “Bloomberg” question - with 7 month discount factors where I did the same process as well.  The answers are so far apart you can eliminate the other three with common sense.

Yeah - I found I could easily discount 2 of the answers in most cases.

Oh - and I am a PhD quant and still thought some of the questions were too verbose!!