Anybody else feel that Schweser material is getting worse and worse year after year?
I have occasionally used Schweser to study and I can’t help but notice that the material is getting really really bad.
I’m not even talking about “finance” mistakes in the questions but simple grammar mistakes, run-on sentences and unclear phrasing. It seems like they would have high-school freshmen writing the material for them.
In level 2 the CFAI curriculum had around 5,000 pages of material. The Schweser books summarized that down to about 3,000. Not much of a summary if you ask me. If I’m going to spend that much time parsing text for the most testable concepts, I’d rather read from the source texts.
I’m not impressed by their level 1 material. As long as they get the point across it’s okay. Sometimes they don’t do that well either.
I feel this was the case for their Qbank and practice questions mostly. I used Schweser for all 3 levels and I remember just being like wtf when looking at the Qbank and EOC questions. It felt like they would make questions harder by simply not writing coherently and in some situations I wouldn’t even trust their answers. Overall, I still think the study material was enough, but I would definitely recommend prioritizing CFAI EOC questions and online questions over Schwesers Qbank questions. The latter could be good for additional practice if you have time.
I did the Level 1 exam 3 years ago and found it very helpful that Qbank questions were classified by LOS. Made it really easy to drill concepts/equations.
Not sure if it’s still the same for Level 1, but this seems to have been taken away from Level 2? Very frustrating!!
It’s not that bad! Especially at the grammar, it’s just fine.
Maybe the concept explanation, it is not up to the mark.
I used Kaplan for all three levels and personally I think they give plenty in terms of information to pass. I passed all three exams on my first run through with them.
I’d say Schweser is OK to drill in ratios, formulas and other concepts where there is just one correct (and relatively simple) answer. I bought their Qbank for L1 and found that repetitive questions pretty helpful in the end because you were forced to do the same calculations over and over. But for L2 and especially for L3, from what I’ve seen, their stuff is just garbage.
My colleague bought Schweser L3 mocks for this year and I was going through some of the problems with him and was astonished by the errors we spotted. (wrong weightings when calculating G-spread using an interpolated yield curve, mix-ups between Active share and active risk, IPS question answers not even closely in line with CFAI’s answer format, etc)
YAAAAAASSSSSSSS QUEEEEEEEEEN
Amen brother (or sister)!
I passed all three levels only using Kaplan. I really enjoyed the materials, and can’t even imagine having used CFA Institute materials. Best part of Kaplan is the 6 mock exams!
For level 2 and 3 they only gave 4 mocks this year. Not sure about level 1.
Nonetheless, I haven’t had problems with Schweser. Their online tracker was a lot better this year. Also, the new app made reading and taking Qbank tests on the train very convenient.