CFA level 1 vs college course load

I’m curious how people feel the CFA level 1 compares to a normal semester’s courseload in college for you guys? I’m interested in a wide range of opinions. For me, compared to a normal semester in undergrad:

CFA is broad and large. Lots of material covering different topics.

CFA matierial isn’t necessarily difficult to grasp. Most of my time spent is on remembering the material off-hand, not on being able to actually understand it.

CFA is more about “knowing” than “thinking.” This is similar to the above. The exam tests you on what you know, not so much on how well you can think. You have to be comfortable with the material and know it well…

Overall, the CFA level 1 is in many ways dissimilar to a semester’s of classes in college. The workload for the CFA is less, but the stress level is higher with 1 comprehensive exam at the end. The difficulty of the material is not as bad, but there’s a lot of it to be tested at once…

Einstein said, “never memorize what you can look up in a book.” He would ever pass this exam…

I’ve been through undergard and business school now. CFA is much more time consuming. Undergrad can be passed with your eyes closed. Grad school is a bit of work and lots of reading, with a higher quality of work expected…but still not so bad. CFA studying is just a giant pain in the ass with a possible giant slap in the face at the end of it all!

hipster are you an undergrad?

No I already got my undergrad. Edit: I can’t find the edit feature for the original post, but I noticed that it may come off as me saying you just have to memorize a bunch of stuff to pass the CFA. Quite the opposite, in my opinion. You have to really understand the material well. What I meant was: that the material is not of particular difficulty. Compared to a difficult math or economics course, that type of stuff you learn in the CFA is a lot easier to grasp… however, there is a lot more volume of material covered in the CFA.

def, this test is only hard in terms of mass volume. if this was broken down into like 30 little tests like it would be if presented over an entire semester through several different classes like in undergrad, each individual test would definitly be killed. its just the way it all comes at you at once. like in undergrad u wud just sit down and memorize a few formulas then go kill the test, but for this there are far too many to simply “memorize”. youre only hope is to truly know them and like what goes into them,as opposed to just memorizing them

I would say that it takes significantly more time and effort to study for the CFA exam compared with undergrad studies. I am in my 4th year econ undergrad and it is a breeze compared with CFA studies. I would say that I devote 70% of my time to CFA and the other 30% to undergrad studies.