Three Popular Myths about the CFA Exam Multiple Choice Question Format

As every CFA^® candidate will know, the CFA exams are largely comprised of multiple choice questions. This doesn't mean that they're easy to pass - as we've calculated, you're statistically more likely to win Euromillions than to pass the CFA exams by chance.

There are also many myths associated with the CFA multiple choice question format that CFA candidates still wrongly assume. We've covered tips on how to guess intelligently in the exams, and to our regular readers some of these will come as no surprise. But especially for those taking the exam in December, in this post we aim to bust more myths and clear the air for our readers about the CFA multiple choice question format before the upcoming exams.

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Myth #1: Multiple-choice questions - it isn't that hard.

When I was in high school, I loved multiple-choice questions. They were the ideal exam format for my unrivalled laziness at studying, matched only by my desire to do well. And with multiple-choice, I could serve both interests - reading between the lines, you could sometimes correctly deduce the right answer without much contextual knowledge of the topic, as the wrong answers were not very convincing substitutes. This means you could study a heck of a lot less and still manage to do reasonably well. Exploiting this flaw in the system has served millions of lazy students like me very well through the decades.

The CFA exams, however, is not one of these systems.

I think it’s fair to say that CFA Institute probably puts as much effort into every wrong answer (distractors) than the right one. Creating the right answer is relatively easy for CFA Institute - you just answer the question correctly, and that’s it. To design the distractors, it’s a process of testing for most common mistakes made when one attempts the questions and offering them alongside the correct answer - meaning that two of the most common wrong answers among candidates tend to accompany the right answer.

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