Date and time
BFF3751 final assessment has been centrally timetabled.
You can see the date and time on My.Monash.
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Format of the assessment
The final assessment will be run as quiz on our moodle site (in a
similar fashion to how we completed the mid semester test):
– The assessment has a duration of 2 hours + 10 mins.
– Open-book assessment.
– At the start time for the exam, you will enter the quiz via moodle.
– At the end of the allocated time, moodle auto-submits whatever answers
you have entered to that point.
– Naturally, it is important that you have reliable internet access for the
duration of the quiz.
– Also advisable to keep an eye on email during the exam, in case I need to
communicate to the class as a whole.
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University regulations
This exam is an open-book exam. You must not communicate with any person other
than the Chief Examiner or IT Support during the exam.
You must not retain, copy, memorise or note down any exam content for personal use
or to share with any other person by any means following your exam.
You must comply with any instructions given to you by your Chief Examiner.
As a student, and under Monash University’s Student Academic Integrity procedure,
you must undertake your in-semester tasks, and end-of-semester tasks, including
exams, with honesty and integrity. In exams, you must not allow anyone else to do
work for you and you must not do any work for others. You must not contact, or
attempt to contact, another person in an attempt to gain unfair advantage during your
exam session. Assessors may take reasonable steps to check that your work
displays the expected standards of academic integrity.
Failure to comply with the above instructions, or attempting to cheat or cheating in an
exam may constitute a breach of instructions under regulation 23 of the Monash
University (Academic Board) Regulations or may constitute an act of academic
misconduct under Part 7 of the Monash University (Council) Regulations.
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Details
The final exam is worth 50% of the total marks for the semester.
There is a hurdle requirement in place in BFF3751:
– If you do not get at least 40/100 on the final exam, you fail the unit.
– Where a student fails the unit solely because they did not satisfy the hurdle
requirement, their final overall mark is 48%.
Unlike a regular exam, I will not be providing:
– A formula sheet, or
– probability tables for N(d1) and N(d2).
Students will do many calculations, therefore need a calculator.
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Details
The assessment will comprise many MCQ and a handful of
“essay” style questions where the student writes a written
answer into a box.
At the time of writing, I have not completely finished the quiz. I
anticipate it will be roughly:
– 40 MCQ, and
– 4-5 essay questions.
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Details
The MCQ will not all have the same number of marks allocated:
– Many MCQ will be worth one mark each
– Some might be worth more (perhaps 2/3/4)
– Some questions will have multiple subparts, and therefore the question
might be worth quite a few marks.
– Pay attention to how many marks each question is worth.
The essay-style questions obviously will be worth more than one
mark:
– The essay questions require a written answer. You have you lecture notes
and tutorial answers at your disposal.
– However, you cannot google the topic and then cut & paste something to
answer the question. This is cheating!
– Answers will be run through plagiarism software (compare to other students’
answers and internet sources)
Taken together, it will all add up to 100 marks. 7
Coverage of unit content
The MST covered Lecture 1-5.
The final exam focuses heavily on Lectures 6-11.
I recommend studying:
– Lecture 4 (options) through to Lecture 11 (exotic and path-dependent
derivatives).
– Lectures 1-3 only to the extent that the topic carries through to later
lectures.
– For example, using continuously-compounded interest rates to discount
cashflows, definitions of arbitrage, synthetic replication, short selling the
underlying asset.
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How to prepare
Newsflash – this semester is very different!
If it was me, I would prepare for the quiz as I would normally
prepare for a closed-book exam:
– If I understand the content well enough to sit a closed-book test, then I
certainly understand it well enough to complete an open-book test.
– Of course, in a closed-book test, there is a lot of memorizing of formulae,
approaches, concepts, etc
– In this case, you have the luxury of not needing to do this to the same
extent.
– You can have concise summaries/notes prepared.
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How to prepare
Organisation and preparation before the test is critical:
– You won’t have time to look things up and learn things “on the fly”.
– You need to understand then topics and simply have summary notes for
quick reference.
– Nothing to stop you having spreadsheets prepared to assist with common
calculations.
– I have distributed a few spreadsheets throughout the semester
(PayoffDiagrams.xls, BlackScholes.xls, call.xls). You will be using these in
Quiz 3 on 12th June.
– You should be ready to utilise these spreadsheets in the final exam too.
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How to prepare
How to prepare:
– Re-read the lecture notes (and listen to lecture recordings).
– Re-read the relevant sections of the text book.
– Work through all tutorial questions until you understand the concepts.
Supplementary questions?
– All of the concepts that will be examined have been introduced and
presented in the lectures and tutorials. Hence, it is sufficient to concentrate
your preparation on the lectures and tutorials.
– The Supp Qs are just extra practice for highly-motivated students.
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Practice Exams
I never provide “practice exams”:
– History suggests that, when practice exams are available, students foolishly spend all
their time on the practice exams.
– And neglect to actually study and learn the course content.
– When the final exam appears with questions that are in any way different to the
practice exams, the students are completely lost.
– It is not in students’ interest to provide practice exams.
I strongly advise students to prepare for the BFF3751 final exam by
studying the course material (lectures, tutorials, supp Q&As, videos,
textbook). You need to understand the concepts, not memorise past
exams.
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Pre-exam consultation
At the end of week 12, the moodle site will be updated to show
consultation times for all teaching staff spanning the weeks
leading into our final assessment.
Please make use of this assistance!
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Special consideration
What happens if I am sick on the day of the exam and cannot sit
the exam?
– Follow the usual Monash process
– Do not contact the Chief Examiner (Phil) to apply for special consideration
– You must follow the link below to complete an application for special
consideration using the online system.
– http://www.monash.edu/exams/changes/special-consideration
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Rounding (sensible suggestions)
d1 and d2 for Black Scholes: 2 dps if using tables
Share prices: 2 dps (i.e., dollars and cents)
u and d: 4 dps when drawing tree
Share prices when drawing tree: 2 dps
and B: 4 dps
p* and 1-p*: 4 dps (important!)
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