Using practice questions and mock exams for Level I of the CFA® Program

The registration fee includes CFA Institute’s Learning Ecosystem with more than 1,000 practice questions and two official mock exams, released about 60 days before each window. An optional Practice Pack adds about 1,000 questions and six mocks, one of them on the Prometric software. Third-party question banks can add volume. Avoid anything sold as ‘recalled’ exam questions: using leaked questions or material known to infringe CFA Institute copyright counts as misconduct.

Do questions right after each reading, not weeks later. Start untimed so you can check your reasoning, then move to timed sets once the method is clear.

Each session has 90 questions in 135 minutes, about 90 seconds per item. Set checkpoints, for example 30 questions every 45 minutes. If an item stalls, pick your best answer and move on. Wrong answers are not penalised, so never leave an item blank; with three choices, ruling out one option turns a blind one-in-three guess into a fifty-fifty choice.

Your mistakes are your study plan. For every wrong or guessed answer, note the topic and reading, the cause, and a one-line fix. Typical causes repeat:

Revisit each error after a few days, then after a week or two, then again in the final review. Re-solve it from scratch instead of re-reading the explanation. Mixed sets across topics train you to recognise which method a question needs without the chapter heading as a hint — exactly what a full exam session demands.

Start full mocks once you have covered all ten topics at least once, usually in the last six to eight weeks. Simulate the real day: two 135-minute sessions, an optional break of about 31 minutes, a screen instead of paper, and scratch paper or a whiteboard like the ones the test centre provides. Leave at least two or three days between mocks for review — a mock without careful review teaches little. Keep the official mocks for the final phase.

Treat a mock score as a signal, not a forecast. CFA Institute does not publish a numeric minimum passing score, so do not chase a fixed percentage from forums. Look at the trend across mocks and at your weakest topics, and plan the next week around your error log.