So I’m feeling pretty stressed looking at the coutdown clock at the top of this page and seeing that there are only 40 days remaining until the Dec Level I exam! I’ve been pretty diligent about studying but I’m definitely far from confident at this point. Here has been my study routine and my thoughts currently about best ways to maximize my remining time. Any thoughts and input are much appreciated!
So what I’ve been doing since mid-July has been coming into work 3 hours early and using that time to study. I’ve been pretty good about it but I’m not always on time and I’ve taken mornings off. It’s really hard to do that 5 days in a row. I have a working fiance and we have a daughter that’s almost 2, so I don’t have much other time to study. I can study on Sunday’s as well, but I try to minimize that because that is the only day that we both have off and can spend together as a family. I know that as I get closer, I’ll be spending more Sunday’s studying and that’s okay.
I’ve used Elan’s videos and have gone through them all at this point following along in the notes and writing in the notes that the instructors write. I pretty much went straight through the videos without doing any practice problems. The only section that I did practice problems for while I was watching the videos was Ethics. And at this point I feel most confident about the Ethics section. I need another quick run through of my notes or practice problems before the exam but I pretty much know it as well as I’m going to at this point.
What I’ve done since finishing the Elan videos is start to go through the Schewser Q-Bank questions in order of LOS. I’ve done that through half of Quant, all of Economics, and about half of FRA. I didn’t finish Quant because I felt like I don’t have enought time to fully learn the more advanced stats stuff. So my plan is to write the formulas down in my notebook and try to cram and memorize as much as possible right before. So my plan was to push through all of the Q bank questions for all of the other sections and then start taking full practice tests 2 weeks before the exam.
So I’m having a couple of concerns about this approach. The first is that I’m not sure I’ll have enought time to push through all of the questions and still have 2 weeks to do mocks and fine tune whatever area is needed. And now I’m also reading about needing to take practice exams earlier and I’m not sure about this strategy. Should I instead of going through all of the Q-Bank questions, only be doing samples to finish sooner and be able to start mocks sooner? If I just took a mock now I feel like I have a okay handle on about half of the material but I’m sure I’d do pretty poorly on the half that I’ve only watched the videos for.
And one more question about mock exams. I read today on 300 hours blog that the magic number of mock exams is 4 to 5 for level I. I’d really like to hit the 5 mark if I can. Right now I have access to 1 CFAI mock, 3 Elan mock exams, and I can make full length mock exams with Q-Bank. What do you think the best way or order to use these would be? Thanks!