Interpreting Your CFA^® Exam Results in the New Format

In recent sittings, CFA Institute has changed the way a candidate’s exam performance is reported. The new format of the CFA^® exam results gives a wealth of information on performance overall, performance compared to the minimum passing score, performance compared to other candidates, and performance by specific topic. Used properly, this breakdown can be a vital tool in organizing your studies for the road ahead.

CFA Minimum Passing Score

The minimum passing score of the CFA exam is illustrated with a dashed line and is the most important piece of information. Your exam score will be represented as a blue solid line, and if that’s above the minimum passing score, then congratulations, you’re on to the next level or filling out your membership application.

If your score is not above the minimum passing score, there’s a lot of other useful information in the report that you can, and absolutely should, use to plan your CFA exam re-take strategy for the next attempt.

What is the CFA Exam Confidence Interval?

The CFA exam confidence interval represents the range by which your score may have been affected by favorable or unfavorable testing factors and is illustrated by a light blue sharing around your exam score. The light blue shading around your exam score is a 90% confidence interval.

The top end of the confidence interval represents the score you could expect if everything went exactly as you’d hoped on the day of the exam—you felt great, the right questions came up, and the candidate next to you had no distractingly annoying habits.

The bottom end of the confidence interval pretty much signifies the opposite. This represents the score you could expect if your weakest areas were examined and you had a bad day during the exam.

In the example below, it’s likely the candidate would have failed even with an ideal set of circumstances. Even the top end of the confidence interval is below the minimum passing score. In this case, we’d recommend critically re-examining the whole approach to CFA exam prep.

The most common reason people fail the CFA exam is simply the time commitment. If life got in the way, and you didn’t put the hours in, it’s an extremely difficult exam to pass due to the sheer volume of information you need to retain.

Almost as common, however, is a lack of question practice. Many candidates read the materials for four months, practice questions for a few weeks, and do a mock exam or two. Undoubtedly, this will leave areas of the syllabus that you’ve read, but on which you’ve not practiced enough questions. This will hurt in the exam. If you don’t know how a reading is typically tested, you’re likely to be met with unexpected and hence tricky questions on exam day.

Our recommendation is questions, questions, questions from the outset. If you have a two-hour study session planned, an hour of it should be question practice, starting on day one. Your last month should be saved almost exclusively for mock exams.

Sign up for our CFA question of the day and get a CFA question sent directly to your inbox every day to help prepare for the next sitting.

CFA Exam Percentiles

The final aspects of the overall score report for the CFA exam are the 90th and 10th percentiles. Only 10% of candidates scored higher than the 90th percentile. If your mark is anywhere up there, it’s safe to say you crushed it. At the other end of the interval, 90% of candidates scored better than the 10th percentile. If you find yourself dipping down there, again it’s a sign that you need to commit to significantly more study time or fundamentally alter your study approach.

CFA Exam Results Topic Breakdown

In addition to the overall pass or fail information, the CFA exam report also gives a breakdown by topic.

In this example, we have a typical breakdown for a theoretical Level I candidate who was an “almost pass.” The candidate has performed well on FRA, achieved over 70%, and set themselves up for a pass. But derivatives has dropped well below the level of reasonable mastery. FRA clearly deserves a lot of study at Levels I and II. It’s voluminous, often not intuitive, and represents a significant chunk of the exam.

But it’s important not to give it too much attention in your studies at the expense of other areas. A poor performance in several of the relatively smaller topics, such as derivatives and alternative investments at Level I, sometimes adds up to a narrow fail despite mastery of the bigger areas.

Often, we see candidates with results reports like this for a couple of reasons:

• The candidate spends too long trying to master 100% of the largest topic (you can’t and won’t).
• The candidate simply doesn’t make it to the end of the syllabus.

As a result, smaller topics get overlooked. “They’re too small to worry about’’ is a common argument against bothering with these areas. But add them up, and they often rival the weighting of the bigger areas for which candidates are willing to over-study.

The best way to address this next time around is to leave enough time for plenty of CFA practice exams. The last five or six weeks should involve practice exams and debriefs, along with short review sessions learning factual areas (via self-testing). The beauty of a practice exam is that it forces you to weigh the topics in the correct manner. You see every topic in its correct weighting, and a thorough review of the results should reveal the areas in which you’re exposed.

It’s also worth noting the position of the percentiles and the width of the confidence intervals. Smaller topics will inevitably have wider intervals (smaller sample size—Level I quant again). But it’s also worth noting that a lower 90th percentile and a higher 10th percentile, and a narrow confidence interval, indicate a harder topic. A reasonable mastery in these topics indicates a very strong performance.

CFA Results Interpretation Summary

We’re all hoping the thick blue line is above the minimum passing score. But if not, don’t ignore the valuable information you have here. An unsuccessful attempt is by definition a result of an unsuccessful study approach. Whether it was a lack of time, a lack of question practice, or a lack of focus in the right areas, you can assess what needs to be put right. With the most experienced and largest full-time faculty, Kaplan Schweser has the blend of CFA study materials, question practice, mock exams, and classes that can aid both your technical mastery and exam technique.