The BA II Plus Cheat Sheet No One Gave You Before the CFA Exam

The Machine Between You and a Passing Score

I want to tell you about the six minutes I lost on a TVM problem during my Level I exam. Not because it's a fun story — it isn't — but because those six minutes came down to one thing: I hadn't changed my payments-per-year setting from 12 to 1. My calculator was silently compounding monthly while I was confidently solving for annual cash flows. The answer it gave me was wrong in the most dangerous possible way: it looked plausible.

The BA II Plus is not an intuitive machine. It was designed by engineers who, I suspect, had a complicated relationship with candidates who needed things to be obvious. But it is the machine the CFA Institute allows, it is the machine most candidates use, and mastering it is non-negotiable. Not aspirational — non-negotiable. On a six-hour exam where quantitative problems appear across all three levels, a calculator that costs you thirty seconds per problem can cost you an entire item set.

So let's talk about how to make it work for you.

The Setting You Must Change Before You Do Anything Else

Before you touch a single practice problem, go into your P/Y setting. Press `2ND` then `I/Y`. You'll see `P/Y =` with a number. If you bought your calculator new, that number is 12. Change it to 1. Press `Enter`, then `2ND CPT` to quit.

Why does this matter so much? Because when P/Y is set to 12, the calculator automatically adjusts your interest rate and compounding for monthly periods. That's useful if you're a mortgage broker. For CFA exam purposes — where problems give you annual rates and annual periods the vast majority of the time — it's a trap that has ended more exam attempts than poor content knowledge ever has. Set P/Y to 1 once, and leave it there for the rest of your CFA career.

The second setting is decimal places. Press `2ND` then `.` (the decimal point key). The calculator defaults to two decimal places, which is usually fine, but intermediate calculations with rounding errors can compound into a wrong final answer. I kept mine at four decimal places for the exam. Press `4`, then `Enter`, then `2ND CPT`.

These two changes take forty-five seconds. Skip them and they might cost you points you can't afford to lose.

TVM Problems: Speed Is the Whole Game

Time value of money problems live in the `N`, `I/Y`, `PV`, `PMT`, and `FV` keys. You already know this. What you might not know is the keystrokes that make these problems fast rather than slow.

The most useful TVM shortcut on the BA II Plus is the `2ND N` function, which computes XNPV — no, wait, simpler than that. It's the `2ND N` key that clears just the TVM registers without clearing everything else. Use `2ND CLR TVM` to zero out all five TVM registers before starting a new problem. I cannot count the number of candidates who get a wrong answer because a previous problem's `PMT` value is still sitting in memory. Make `2ND CLR TVM` a reflex. Do it before every TVM problem, always.

For annuity problems, the BGN vs. END mode setting is the other killer. The calculator defaults to END mode, which prices ordinary annuities — cash flows at the end of each period. Annuities due, where payments come at the beginning, require BGN mode. Press `2ND PMT` to toggle. You'll see `BGN` displayed in the top right corner of the screen when it's active. The exam will not always tell you explicitly which mode applies — you have to read the problem carefully enough to know. And after any annuity-due problem, switch back to END. Always.

One practical trick for bond valuation problems: when you're solving for price using semiannual coupons, set N to the total number of semiannual periods, I/Y to the semiannual discount rate, PMT to the semiannual coupon payment, FV to par. Then CPT PV. This sounds obvious, but under exam pressure, candidates default to annual figures and then wonder why their answer is 3.2% off from every available choice.

NPV and IRR: The Functions Most Candidates Never Practice

The cash flow worksheet — accessed with the `CF` key — is where a lot of candidates check out. They've heard it's complicated. It isn't complicated. It just requires deliberate practice with the keystrokes, because the logic is slightly different from TVM.

Here's the flow: press `CF` to open the worksheet. Press `2ND CLR WORK` to clear previous entries. Enter `CF0` — your initial outflow, usually a negative number — then press `Enter` and the down arrow. Enter `C01` — the first period's cash flow — press `Enter`, down arrow. Then `F01` appears: this is the frequency of that cash flow. If the same cash flow repeats for three consecutive periods, enter 3 instead of re-entering the value three times. This saves real time on multi-period problems.

After entering all cash flows, press `NPV`. Enter your discount rate at the `I=` prompt, press `Enter`, down arrow, then `CPT`. That's your net present value. To get IRR from the same cash flow data, press `IRR` then `CPT`. The calculator does the iteration. You don't have to.

The single mistake I see candidates make here — the one Sophos Academy's free practice questions flag most often in our diagnostic data — is forgetting to clear the CF register before starting a new problem. Old cash flows stack on top of each other silently. Clear it every time.

Statistics: The Worksheet Most Candidates Ignore

The `DATA` and `STAT` worksheets handle descriptive statistics — mean, standard deviation, and correlation — faster than you can do them by hand, which matters because the CFA exam occasionally asks you to compute these from a small data set rather than giving them to you directly.

Press `2ND 7` to open the DATA worksheet. Enter your X values using `Enter` and the down arrow. If you have paired data for correlation, enter X values in X01, X02, etc., and Y values in Y01, Y02, etc. Then press `2ND 8` to open STAT, scroll through, and read out the mean (`X̄`), sample standard deviation (`Sx`), or population standard deviation (`σx`) as needed.

The exam almost always wants sample standard deviation, which is `Sx` on the display. Population standard deviation uses n in the denominator; sample uses n–1. Getting these confused costs you the answer even when your data entry was perfect.

The Three Minutes You'll Win Back

Here's what mastering these workflows actually means in practice. A typical TVM problem that a fumbling candidate solves in ninety seconds — because they're hunting for keys, second-guessing their P/Y setting, and re-entering a number they miskeyed — takes a fluent candidate about thirty-five seconds. An NPV problem that trips someone up on cash flow entry takes thirty seconds if you've drilled the keystrokes until they're automatic.

Across a full exam session, that difference accumulates into three to five minutes of recaptured time. On the CFA exam, three minutes is enough time to attempt an entire additional question. That is not a trivial margin.

The only way to build this fluency is repetition under mild pressure. Timed practice is the mechanism. If you're drilling problems where you're not watching the clock, you're not training the right reflex. Sophos Academy's timed mock exams were built specifically for this — to put you in conditions close enough to the real thing that the calculator work becomes muscle memory, not active thought.

What to Do Next

Start with the free practice questions at [sophosacademy.org/practice](https://sophosacademy.org/practice) — work through the TVM and cash flow problems specifically with your calculator in hand, using the keystroke sequences above. Once those feel automatic, move to the full timed mock exams at [sophosacademy.org/mock-exams](https://sophosacademy.org/mock-exams), where the real goal is building the composure to execute cleanly when the clock is running and the stakes are real. Your calculator should be the least stressful thing in that room.