Why your practice percentage is optimistic
This is the guide we most wanted to write, because the failure mode it describes is one our own product can cause. A question bank, any question bank including ours, will tend to tell you that you are doing better than you are. Understanding why is most of the work.
You are usually untimed
Ninety seconds per question changes which mistakes you make. Nearly everyone scores lower under the clock.
You are in one topic at a time
Knowing the next question is about duration puts you halfway to the answer. The real exam gives you no such warning.
You have seen some of them
Recognition is not recall, and it does not distinguish itself from the inside.
Difficulty is not calibrated
No third-party provider knows the real difficulty distribution. Anyone claiming otherwise is guessing with confidence.
Common mistake: reading a bank score as a prediction. Treat CFA Institute's own practice questions and mock exams as the reference standard, and every third-party score, ours included, as a relative indicator of progress rather than a prediction of your result.
Four signals that mean something
1A full, timed, single-sitting mock
Two sessions of 135 minutes, done properly, with no notes and no pausing. The more useful output is how the last twenty questions of each session went compared with the first twenty. A sharp drop is a stamina and pacing problem, and it is fixable in a way that a knowledge gap is not.
2No subtopic floor left standing
CFA Institute does not publish a single pass mark, and the minimum passing score is set per exam. Historically fewer than half of Level I candidates pass (43% of 28,145 in August 2026). Look for holes: a subtopic where you are consistently below the rest is a concentrated risk, because the exam will not politely give you fewer questions there.
3Ethics is not left to the end
Ethics is weighted 10 to 15% from 2027 (15 to 20% in 2026), and CFA Institute has publicly described using performance on it to decide candidates near the boundary. If it is your weakest number a month out, it is the highest-value fix, and it requires no mathematics, only precision about what each Standard requires.
4Your errors have changed character
Early on, wrong answers come from not knowing. Later they should come from misreading, rushing, or a calculator setting. When your mistakes stop being conceptual, you are close. When they are still conceptual two weeks out, you know exactly where the remaining time goes.
The candidates who get unpleasant surprises are usually the ones who averaged comfortably while carrying two or three subtopics they had quietly written off. Start with our free Ethics practice questions.
Ethics needs no maths, only precision. Try one:
A portfolio manager directs a disproportionately large allocation of oversubscribed IPO shares to her own personal account and to a favored colleague, leaving many clients with minimal allocations. Which principle of the CFA Institute Code of Ethics is most clearly violated?
Ten more free Ethical and Professional Standards questions →Practise on the real exam timing
Create a free account and keep every question you miss in one review list.
What to do in the last two weeks
| Do | Why |
|---|---|
| Sit CFA Institute mocks, timed | Treat those numbers as the real ones. |
| Re-answer every question you previously got wrong | All of them. |
| Drill your weakest two subtopics only | Resist the comfort of the ones you are good at. |
| One Ethics pass over the Standards themselves | Not just questions about them. Then test yourself on the Standards, with explanations. |
| Stop learning new material | It will not stick, and it costs you consolidation time. |
An honest closing note
No practice platform can tell you that you will pass, and any that implies it is selling you confidence rather than preparation. What a good one can do is show you, precisely, where your remaining risk is concentrated, and give you enough questions to do something about it.
Start with the free questions, and if the diagnosis is worth having, the rest of the bank is there. Taking Level II next? See how the Level II exam is structured.