PRM Queries

I just got the sample questions 2 days back for PRM exam 2. I was scheduled to write my exam on 20 Sept but after the sample questions I have postponed it. The reason being that I was expecting more of the questions being about maths but in the sample papers I saw a lot of questions regarding Options,futures,forwards and also bonds. A few of these are covered to some extent in handbook 2 but not all. So based on this I have the following questions for you.

1. I am writing exam 2 first. Do I need to go in the right order from paper 1 onwards?

2. Are the questions in exam weighted in the sense that do some questions carry more weight than others ? Or if I have 16 right answers out of 24 (more than 60%), I will clear?

3. What might be the approx break up of questions relating to calculations and others?

4. Also are the sample questions a true reflection of the difficulty level of the exam or it might be easier/tougher than that?

5. What is your rating of PRM on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the easiest and 10 the toughest?

6. Lastly, I have referred only the handbook. Is that enough for the exam?

Priyasonie,

Thank you for the questions. There is probably not one right answer to these questions but I can give you my personal view.

- I saw a lot of questions regarding Options,futures,forwards and also bonds
1. One of the issues with the PRMIA exam is the overlap between the exams. There are cases where what one might think belongs to Exam 1 (eg, options, bond and futures calculations etc) have shown up in Exam 2. With a view that it is probably better to be prepared, I have repeated some questions from Exam 1 in Exam 2. They ask all kinds of things, but what can you do? Have a read here: www.riskprep.com/blog/common-questions-b...ams-on-riskprep.html

- I am writing exam 2 first. Do I need to go in the right order from paper 1 onwards?
2. While there is no reason to follow the order of the exams, and you can start with whatever you are comfortable with, I believe that the exams are organized in a reasonably logical order. Exam 1 gives you an introduction to financial markets and securities, and Exam 2 then proceeds with some of the heavy lifting for the math. But if you have started preparing for Exam 2, by all means go for it. No reason to change course now.

- Are the questions in exam weighted in the sense that do some questions carry more weight than others ? Or if I have 16 right answers out of 24 (more than 60%), I will clear?
3. Are all questions equally weighted? This is a mystery to me. There is nothing in the candidate guidebook or on PRMIA's website to suggest that they are weighted differently; however, it beats my understanding as to how a person could get 87 in a 36 question exam. One could either get 31 questions right, ie 86%, or 32, ie 89%. Maybe they are rounding the 86.1% upwards to 87. Or how do you explain a score of 95 on a 24 question exam. So I suspect they do use some sort of weighting, but it isn't known to anyone. I wouldn't worry about counting questions, just go and swing your bat the best you can at the ball.

- What might be the approx break up of questions relating to calculations and others?
4. It is difficult to say, in fact there is overlap between the two but if I remember right from my exams (which was a while ago), I could say that every 2nd or sometimes 3rd question was a numerical one. In other words, 40-50% of the questions were numerical.


- Also are the sample questions a true reflection of the difficulty level of the exam or it might be easier/tougher than that?
5. Some are easier, some are tougher. The challenge is that PRMIA's question pool is confidential and I do not ask anyone for the questions they actually came across. Doing so would dilute the value of the designation, and no one will go for it, which means this website won't be needed either. What I tried to do was to capture the key concepts for every topic so that if we can focus on the understanding, we can answer the questions no matter how they are framed.

- Lastly, I have referred only the handbook. Is that enough for the exam?
6. In my view, the handbook is enough. But be prepared - there will invariably be some questions that you would not find in the handbook. For those questions, there is no real way to prepare because there isn't one other single book that might cover them. The best approach for those is to be prepared with a solid understanding of the fundamentals so you can try to figure the question out even if you haven't seen it before. Have a look a this write up too that I wrote some time ago - www.riskprep.com/forum/topic?id=12. Also have a read of this: www.riskprep.com/forum/topic?id=14&p=1#p21

As for the one point on the difficulty level of the PRMIA exams, I think really the question is how well prepared you are on a scale of 1 to 10. If you are at 10, the net difficult level will not exceed 0 in any situation.

Hope the above helps.

Mukul