Just passed my CFA — here's what actually worked

Congrats on passing! Can I ask — how many questions did the actual exam have compared to what the practice tests simulate? I've seen different numbers online and want to calibrate my timing during practice.

For what it's worth — I've taken the CFA twice now. First attempt I underestimated the exam prep questions. Second time I focused almost exclusively on applied practice and passed comfortably. The difference is real.

Coming back to this thread — just passed my CFA yesterday. Everything about the cfa practice test section is accurate. For anyone still studying, the cfa first assist surgical roles was the closest thing to the real exam I found.

Quick update for anyone still grinding. I started doing full timed practice sets a couple weeks ago and just hit 78% on my last one, up from like 61% when I began. The jump came from actually redoing every question I missed instead of just reading the answer and moving on. That's it. Sounds dumb but it's what moved the needle for me.

I'm planning to sit the real exam in about three weeks once I get a couple more practice runs above 80. Still nervous, ngl. But the gap between where I was and where I am now is wild, and most of it happened in the last stretch when I stopped passively reading and started testing myself every single day. If your scores feel stuck, that's probably the thing to change.

Working full time made this brutal, honestly. I'd wake up at 5am before my shift and squeeze in 45 minutes, then hit another session on my lunch break if I could. Weekends were basically just study days. The thing that saved me was stopping the passive reading early and switching to pure practice — I'd drill questions on whatever I had time for, even cfa perioperative assessment topics I thought I already knew, because the gaps always showed up.

It's not glamorous but consistency beat everything. Some days I only got 20 minutes in and that felt pointless, but it added up. If you're juggling a job and a life, don't wait for a perfect study block that never comes — just keep the reps going whenever you can.

Congrats on passing — 15 weeks is seriously impressive. I'm about eight weeks in and currently drowning in Fixed Income, specifically the valuation of bonds with embedded options. The binomial tree stuff is clicking okay but when it comes to OAS versus Z-spread interpretation I keep second-guessing myself on the exam-style questions. Did you find that topic as brutal as I'm finding it, or was there a specific way you worked through it that made it finally stick?

The switch to active practice you mentioned is exactly what I've been trying to do lately. Starting to feel like just reading the curriculum is basically comfort food — feels productive but isn't. What I'm curious about is how you handled topic areas where your mock scores were still stuck even after drilling problems. Did you go back to the readings, or just keep hammering practice questions until the pattern recognition kicked in?