There are no certainties unless you walk into the exam completely unprepared and are literally guessing at every question.
It has varied for me. FAR was my first exam, and I was expecting it to be absolutely horrible, based on what I had read about it here and had heard about it from friends. But I came away thinking it wasn't that bad. I could tell the MCQs were getting harder, but I never felt like I had lost control of the exam. Another key point for me was that I knew I had done well on the Sims. I do financial accounting and reporting for a living, so journal entries and revenue recognition are second nature to me, and my Sims were all in my wheelhouse. I think when you do well on the Sims, it makes you think you did well overall because the Sims seem to be what people freak out about the most. I didn't know what to expect, score-wise, because it was my first exam, but I was not surprised to get an 88. That was commensurate with how I felt I had performed.
I came away from REG feeling like I had taken the wrong exam. I was sure I had failed because the MCQs seemed more and more impossible as I moved through the testlets. And what I came to learn, from reading other people's experiences here, was that when you feel like you are getting screwed on the MCQs, it's likely because you are doing really well, so you are getting more difficult questions. I also had a couple Sims that were very difficult, and that had me worried. But I did very well on REG, despite thinking I failed.
On AUD, I felt prepared going in, and I did not feel like the exam was overly difficult (in large part because AUD is so conceptual, and theory questions don't seem that difficult, in general), but I bombed the MCQs (according to my score report). The only reason I passed was because I crushed the Sims. Yet I felt much better about AUD than I did REG. I would imagine what happened with AUD was that I did poorly on the first set of MCQ and kept getting easier questions, which are not worth as many points. So even if I did get a lot of them correct, it doesn't make up for not getting the higher point values associated with the difficult questions.
On BEC, my feelings were very much like they were with FAR. I knew the questions were getting more difficult as I progressed through the exam, but I had a solid grasp of the material, so I was feeling like I did well on the exam, and sure enough, I did. I was never SURE that I passed because this whole thing is so convoluted, but I was not so perplexed by the questions that I felt like failure was a reasonable possibility. As with FAR, my score of 89 seemed to fit with how I felt I had performed.
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