First off, good luck to everyone taking the exam this weekend.
I thought I’d give some advice on how best to use the last few days before the L1 exam.
First off, sorry to say, but there aren’t a lot of things you can do at this point to DRASTICALLY improve your score in the four days remaining. You’ll make improvements at the margin, and those are important. But you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot (or as a Persian friend says the idiom in his country is, “hammering yourself in the balls”):
MAINTAIN SLEEP DISCIPLINE.
There’s a lot of research on the effects of even mild sleep deprivation on cognitive function (I’m an academic, so even though it’s not my area, I follow this stuff). One study found that if you take a person who performs at the 90th percentile academically and short them 2 hours of sleep a night for two straight nights, they perform at something like the 60th percentile. And that’s a HUGE difference.
This is particularly important for an exam like the CFA L1. The questions aren’t particularly difficult, but CFAI is notorious for giving questions with slight “Curves”. So being even a bit sleep deprived could make a significant difference.
There’s a tendency to burn the midnight oil the last few days to squeeze in those last couple hours of study. But there’s a real cost of shorting yourself for sleep. My reading is that it’s “cumulative” sleep deprivation that matters. So, since you’ll likely not sleep well friday, make sure you get a decent night’s sleep on Thursday.
And read Ethics on Friday before bed. If that won’t put you out, nothing will.
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