Minimum passing scores

budiman90

New Member
I took the May 2019 Part II exam today (no, I'm not going to talk about the May 2019 exam in particular). Was wondering about the prediction of minimum passing score.

By my calculation, I only scored ~60% (48 out of 80 problems). This is after taking into account answers which I am quite confident about [weight 1.0], answers which I eliminated 2 choices and had to guess between the remaining 2 choices [weight 0.5] , as well as weight 0.333 and weight 0.25 answers. I'm not sure if I would pass with this score.

By comparison, in Nov 2018 exam which I passed, I calculated my score to be ~74% and the results was Q1-Q1-Q1-Q1.

What do you guys think?
 

Detective

Active Member
Only took L1 today, but I think it’s hard to speculate. At best you will get a sense of people who choose to self report here felt if it was generally easier or harder than expected.

Though just talking without knowing what I’m talking about, it sounds like you’re potentially near a cut off.

I would ask you given you scored in all Q1 in L1, did you find L2 much more challenging or didn’t prepare as enough? It probably falls against the rules, so don’t answer me until Monday.
 

AK88

New Member
I took the May 2019 Part II exam today (no, I'm not going to talk about the May 2019 exam in particular). Was wondering about the prediction of minimum passing score.

By my calculation, I only scored ~60% (48 out of 80 problems). This is after taking into account answers which I am quite confident about [weight 1.0], answers which I eliminated 2 choices and had to guess between the remaining 2 choices [weight 0.5] , as well as weight 0.333 and weight 0.25 answers. I'm not sure if I would pass with this score.

By comparison, in Nov 2018 exam which I passed, I calculated my score to be ~74% and the results was Q1-Q1-Q1-Q1.

What do you guys think?

Yep, pretty much the same observation here. Just got out of the exam room disappointed. I wonder they always do Part II this hard ...
 

nikic

Active Member
The difficulty was kinda crazy. There were at least 15-20 problems where I got it down to two choices!

I managed to sit and recall 40 questions - of these I expect anywhere between 22-25 corrects. Now if I managed to score above even in the other 40, and the passing mark is around the 50-55% region (i.e. between 40 to 44 corrects out of 80), I should be able to pass.

For part 1 I estimated myself getting around 60-65, and eventually got a 2-2-1-1. Here, preliminarily, I would expect something like a 2-3-2-3-2. Hopefully enough for a pass.

EDIT: 48/80 is a guaranteed pass score based on reading previous year's threads, so chill mate!
 

budiman90

New Member
I read some other threads in this forum and now understand that this wondering of "cut off mark" and "minimum passing score" all boils down to just speculation. I guess I'll just have to wait for a couple of months for the actual result.
 
I thought it was pretty tricky too. My quantitative questions seemed to work most of the time at least, but the wordy ones I feel like I was often reducing the list to a choice of 2/3 and making what I saw as the most likely answer from those. Don't think I could guess what my score was. I got about 70pct in the GARP practice exam last week, but that felt a lot more comfortable than yesterday's paper.
 

budiman90

New Member
Only took L1 today, but I think it’s hard to speculate. At best you will get a sense of people who choose to self report here felt if it was generally easier or harder than expected.

Though just talking without knowing what I’m talking about, it sounds like you’re potentially near a cut off.

I would ask you given you scored in all Q1 in L1, did you find L2 much more challenging or didn’t prepare as enough? It probably falls against the rules, so don’t answer me until Monday.

A combination of both, I'd say. In terms of the material, there are more topics that I was not familiar with prior to studying. I spent roughly the same amount of time studying for P2, probably should have studied more given the relative level of unfamiliarity of the materials. Compared to studying for P1, I didn't get a chance to review more questions from Schweser question banks. Also didn't practise as many practice exam questions.
 

budiman90

New Member
I thought it was pretty tricky too. My quantitative questions seemed to work most of the time at least, but the wordy ones I feel like I was often reducing the list to a choice of 2/3 and making what I saw as the most likely answer from those. Don't think I could guess what my score was. I got about 70pct in the GARP practice exam last week, but that felt a lot more comfortable than yesterday's paper.

The 2019 practice exam contains 46% calculation/quantitative questions : 54% conceptual/theory/wordy questions, which is not representative of the actual exam (~75% conceptual/theory/wordy). I've read in the Nov 2018 exam feedback thread that there are far more conceptual/theory/wordy questions too. The quantitative ones are relatively easy and on par with the practice exams. They are certainly easier than P1's. I am wondering if GARP intends to change the image of FRM exam from being "quant-oriented" to "balanced" or even "conceptual".
 

budiman90

New Member
The difficulty was kinda crazy. There were at least 15-20 problems where I got it down to two choices!

I managed to sit and recall 40 questions - of these I expect anywhere between 22-25 corrects. Now if I managed to score above even in the other 40, and the passing mark is around the 50-55% region (i.e. between 40 to 44 corrects out of 80), I should be able to pass.

For part 1 I estimated myself getting around 60-65, and eventually got a 2-2-1-1. Here, preliminarily, I would expect something like a 2-3-2-3-2. Hopefully enough for a pass.

EDIT: 48/80 is a guaranteed pass score based on reading previous year's threads, so chill mate!

I sure hope so :) Thanks.

I wouldn't say the difficulty is crazy, but you do need to be really familiar with the concepts, and there a lot of them.
 
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