while I was taking a break, I saw Joey’s post on the “How to prevent burnout” thread, and he mentioned the CFAI suggestion of 300 hrs, so I got a bit curious and did a search on the forum on “how much time”, and found on avg, most people put in about 10-15 hrs per wk…but I swear I read somewhere here before people spent 8 months to 1 year to study for this exam… ok, I didn’t buy the schweser study notes, so I read through the CFAI text, from front to back, all 6 volumes, and initially, I was reading the optional segments as well…and doing that took me quite a while (as anyone can imagine)… so my question is, what did most people use in general to prepare for this? did anyone bother to read the entire set from CFAI? I must say it has a massive amount of material, and now I’m going through the LOSs, some of these material are not even covered, I feel pretty dumb having read everything, but at least I made sure I didn’t miss anything…for those who studied with the schweser study notes, how do you find them? What about people who passed the exam? I’m using the qbank right now and I’m doing all the LOS/reading/session quizzes, and I’m consistently scoring upwards of 90% on them, is that indicative of the amount of time I’ve put into studying the material or just that schweser qbank questions are too easy? Just getting late, feeling a bit tired and don’t feel like diving back into the text…
Scoring =<90% you say… I think you are OK for the exam & base on the some post here, what you will have to do is to practice the actual exam. Majority of post here says that if you score at least <70% in Book 6 of schweser you will be ok for the actual exam. Don’t worry of diving back again the text co’z i believe that CFA text is much more hard to comprehend but the benefit of that is once you become familiar in the concept it will hard to forget. I am using schweser & I can say that it is not that wordy as CFAtext, easy to understand, much more mathematical than CFAtext, teaches you on how to use ur financial calculator, they strickly focus on the LOS… However, I have to be attentive in reading it co’z there are some concept there that they only explain it in just one paragraph or a couple of sentence where in It is 1 or 2 pages in CFA text.
Furthermore, base in your post you are much more ok than those who are using schweser (including me) if you can find the qbank easy. Dude I admire your effort on just totally rellying in CFA text! I wish I can also do the same.
My first post… I started studying July 9th and I’m almost done reading all of the CFAI texts and have got the Schweser Notes and QBank. I figured I’d get an overview of all of the material by reading all of the volumes and then use the Schweser Notes to hone in on the LOS’s specifically. I’ll probably end up doing the QBank questions during work when I’m supposed to be programming heh. I think this approach has been working so far for me as I am an engineer and have never had a finance class (although I’ve read many books on the subject). By reading all of the CFAI volumes it has helped me learn the terminology and pick up stuff along the way. I’m finding the material fairly easy to comprehend (especially the quant stuff), there’s just a lot of it. I figure that at least all of the material will go into my head at some point, even if I don’t retain it all right away. I’m also planning on doing the CFA practice exams and the BSAS exams a little bit closer to exam time. I will take the entire week off of work before the exam to study and do practice exams/questions. I normally spend roughly 2-3 hours a day reading including weekends with a day off every once in awhile to prove to my friends that I’m not a lost cause. Don’t know if it’s the best approach, but that’s my method.
How did you get through all the CFAI texts in 2 months? My strategy is to understand the general concepts and definitions, but not spend TOO Much time on the text. The bulk of my time is spent on the weekends doing practice questions, because for me, that somehow makes all the material concrete in my mind. I don’t feel too burned out at all, because with this schedule, I don’t put too much pressure on myself to memorize every word of the text, and instead, paying major heed to the questions. We will see if this works. I hope it does!
I don’t know how I got through them that quickly. I guess I spent a lot of time reading. I’m not quite done yet though. On the last book. I guess I wanted to read all the texts to get a base before focusing on the specific LOS’s since I don’t have a finance background.