Did y'all know this?
For the CFA Level 1 exam, there are 20 “pretest” or experimental questions mixed into the exam. These questions are being tested by CFA Institute for possible future use.
So:
Your exam has 180 total questions
Only 160 are scored
The remaining 20 are unscored experimental questions
Candidates do not know which 20 they are
Getting those experimental questions right or wrong does not affect your score.
This is officially stated by the CFA Institute. The pretest questions are spread throughout the exam and look exactly like normal questions.
Now the important part psychologically:
Many candidates walk out feeling terrible because:
some questions feel unfamiliar,
unusually worded,
harder than mocks,
or “out of syllabus.”
A portion of those may indeed be experimental questions. But not every difficult question is experimental. So you should not assume every hard question “won’t count.”