Hi everyone, I failed my cfa level 2 twice band 5 I did all cfa institute online qestions cfa chapter end questions and read both schewser and cfa books. However I din do qbank or any mocks, missed derivative and quants. I need help with my strategy and questions. Should I read from cfai books because last time I did prepare from cfai books but at the end I had no retention. Plz advise
definitely shouldn’t skip the mocks. try to do around 6. read schweser , do eoc and examples on curriculum , topic tests on the website. This i feel is a minimum.
Doing questions isn’t enough. Spaced repetition I found was most beneficial to me. Do say 3 SS of reading, go back and do SS 1 BB examples, then read SS 4, then go do SS 2 BB, and so on. If you read and don’t look at it again for months you won’t retain it. Keep it fresh, keep reviewing, and so on. Another thing I found beneficial was doing EOC Q’s and really diving into why the answer was right or wrong. I’d go back to the text about the question and read/make notes as to why it was right/wrong. As for mocks I did less for L2 than L1. I did 2 Schweser and 1 official but did a lot of the topic tests. They were said to be much harder than the actual exam so I kept doing those until I was consistently scoring well and understood the material sufficiently.
no retention – you need some level of retention … do not read mechanically. Write down to help keep stuff in place … helps with some recall.
You probably are taking it light - that this is an exam that can be passed by “reading” stuff… Does not happen. May have been true in Level 1 (for you, maybe). For me each level was equally difficult. Even more so as you go higher up.
So you need to give enough time to the process, and learn it right.
Highly doubt you did all the questions and still fail. Maybe you did them too early on and did not review towards the exam date?
Can’t speak too much for Level 2 since I only passed Level 1 but from my experience reading is good for starting to understand the material but it really starts clicking a lot more during practice questions/mocks. The CFAI texts are way too long/detailed and reading through them without doing any questions/mocks doesn’t really do you a whole lot of good.
@keep_running. I did only questions from CFAI online test and CFAI end of chapter questions. You are right I did do questions early. But the question is I prepared from CFA books as well as Schewer but still failed. I did a lot of reading and at the end I had no time to prepare for Qunats and derivatives so I skipped both all together. I scored below 50% in FSA which was every surprising, quants and derivatives. I guess if I had prepared for Quants and derivatives at least it would have improved my Band.
In Level 2 - a couple of questions can make you change your band.
Recognize there are 6 questions in an item set. If you used 70% as a sure fire passing score … you get two questions in an item set wrong - you have already failed that item set. 4/6 = 67%.
So
a) you need to prepare really well.
b) be sure of what you know
c) practice / practice / practice
d) learn in different ways / strategies - so you are better equipped to handle what is thrown at you.
I really advise studying with Mark Meldrum.
He’s a professor in a university in Canada. Very knowledgeable and explain topics in a simple manner.
You need to retain what you study. It’s the key for passing L2 - in my opinion. Also, it’s useless if you pass level 2 but cannot apply the materials IRL. I did not necessarily read all CFAI curriculum - but definitely did the EOC questions and TT. They were hard and made me think I did not know anything after the hours I put into studying. I also focused and made sure I had the higher weighted topics down cold.
Background: my bachelor degree was in finance but it basically only covered Corp Fin. I had to learn everything else from 0.