Under a tight schedule here and I’ve done the best I’ve can to stand myself a decent chance of passing this exam on 6th december. Just finished full read through of the Schweser books today after annotating, understanding the concepts, doing all of the EOC qs in Schweser and a few from the CFAI EOC.
Problem is my retention rate hasn’t been fantastic and there is stuff I read a couple months ago which may seem a little distant now, so I need a plan of action. I’ve taken three weeks off work until the exam and at my disposal I have;
Schweser secret sauce
Practice exams (CFA and Kaplan)
The Kaplan question bank
A heap of workshop qs from the Kaplan revision course
Where do I start and where do I finish? I’ve only gone through the material once so will no doubt have to put in some time again to go through the material again but I want to also get the right balance with qs.
How would you approach this one?? Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated and thank you all for your kindness. I understand I’ve left it late to finish my initial read only now…
only my opinion, but if i were you i’d spend a couple weeks more on reviewing the material a 2nd time through. i would probably do something like 1 SS a day (more if you can). there are 18 SS, so try to get through them in 2 weeks or so. i’d then spend the other 2 weeks hammering questions and mocks/etc.
What I’m doing is going through all the CFAI EOC’s first (read the Schweser notes some time back and have quite a bit of background in finance/accountancy so I’m vaguely familiar with most of the stuff). From my readings it seems to be the view that the CFAI EOC’s are much more representative of the exam than the Schweser EOC’s ones but someone who’s actually done the exam please confirm this.
After that I plan to start hammering out the Schweser QB and mocks and run through all the CFAI EOC’s at least 1-2 more times.
Whenever I run into something that I didn’t know, I make a little note for myself that I keep and can revise.
Elans Eleventh Hour (Elans version of the Schweser Secret Sauce) in 3-4 Days.
Memorise the formulaes in (1-2 Days)
Do 6 full exams, in 18 days. 1 day for mocks and 2 days to go over what went wrong. The first mocks might take longer, specially the review process, but hopefully your retention will be higher before the exams.
Make sure you get a good night sleep in the last 2 days before the exam and would recommend you just chill and go over the formulaes sheet. (Elans Website offer them for free, or Schweser Quick sheet which is free as well).
Good luck and I hope that we both pass :D, because we are more or less in the same shoes exactly. I understand the curriculum but my retention rate is around the same as yours right now. And Bill’s website is amazing, you should look at it.
Did you hit the Qbanks? I did 1000 so far and plan to do another 500 more but with less than 4 weeks left, I think I will shfit gears and start doing mock exams.
I did some quetsions on Schweser questionbanks. When creating the exams I recommend that you dont choose the grade as you go option as it might get you worried and effect your performance in later questions. However, I used to have the “show correct answers as you go” to read the explanations of why I got the wrong answers. Doing CFAI mocks are the best performance indicator since I assume mock questions were written by the same people as the real exam questions and are prepared with the intention of giving candidates a better feel of the type and difficulty of questions. Scheweser questionbanks are good specially, reading the explanation after each questions and the performance tracker after each exam. In later stages, I will only tick options intermediate and advance options for the questions that pops out. Dot focus on the number of questions done. if your not practising right (Learning why you got a question wrong and learnning the concept).