I wrote this the other day:

I don't know if this will be encouraging to anyone but I will say that I failed L2 last year in band 5. I knew leaving the exam hall I'd bombed and possibly that badly, so I wasn't overly discouraged. The reality is that I was barely getting across the 50% mark on mocks. My big failures were FRA and equities. I forgot how to do a particular valuation method and I never properly studied a big and often problematic FRA topic. I knew I needed to do better on FRA and equities.

My study plan this year included covering everything in the curriculum once again, but also being very certain that I knew the idiosyncrasies of the deeper and procedural topics... pensions, leases, international translations, all the valuation approaches. It wasn't a matter of repeating the same process from the year before and hoping for a different outcome. I knew what I'd done poorly on and I had to embrace the topics I hated and become comfortable with them.

This year I knew going in I would be guessing on some derivatives material, and would struggle with economics, and integration of analysis techniques was a bit of a crap shoot. But I'd moved the dial in some other key areas and I knew the actual exam would be easier than any of the mocks. I felt good about the am session, less good about pm, but thought there was a 50/50 chance I'd done it. I steeled myself knowing that I was willing to write at least one more time without doubt.

Happily, I made it. I moved from band 5 to a pass in one year. So it is possible. In fact, it might be preferable to bomb - you know very well what needs fixing. If you fail in band 10, it's less obvious... you just need to do better all the way around, in a sense. Regardless, it can be done, with proper effort. The CFA exams don't require you to be a genius - just diligent.

However, as I note, it may be harder to determine what to do to pass the second time if you're a band 10, versus a band 5...