An article from efinancialcareers Canada, with many references from this board
http://news.efinancialcareers.com/ca-en/181229/long-really-take-pass-cfa-level-iii/
that’s awesome, an article pretty much written based on our results thread. Sumz was the one who passed and husband failed and i think CPK or Jeffsick might have been referenced as well.
As a sidenote, the 18 months thing pisses me off as unless you didn’t study at all for level 1 and just turned up for the test in December you took more than 18 months.
Level 1 is a joke though…
I did 90% of my studying while on a two week vacation. During that time I studied from the moment I woke up until I went to bed.
Passed with a 40/60/80 score of 58.5, so this is the bare minimum you can do and still pass.
Same strategy for Level 1 & 2 but I passed those with flying colors. Therefore level 3 is harder to study quickly!
Agree on the 18 months thing - 2 years more like.
I had no background of finance before I took level 1. Level 1 was hard enough for me. I had to go through at least browse through all the books in order to pass but agreed the difficulty of level 1 was not comparable to level 3.
Level 2 was okay - personally i found it was easier than level 1 given I had gained knowledge by doing level 1. It was mainly about calculating.
Level 3 was difficult indeed. Because I had other personal commitments so i can’t say how much exact of time i spent. I would say around 3-4 months… I read the books as well as the notes.
Level 3 preparation took me about 9 or 10 weeks, thereof 2 weeks vacation… I basically only learned by doing the practice exams 
I did all 6 Schweser exams and the CFAI 2014 mock exams and worked with Qbank a lot… I think I did about 80% of the Qbank questions. Besides I watched some (not all) Schweser Videos to get an understanding of the topics but was only able to read parts of the Schweser Notes and the Curriculum because I had so less time…
But I’m not sure if you should follow my example, because I had a hard time during my studies with keeping my nerve and not giving up and had to deal with colleagues of mine who both started in November, spent several hours a day on studying, read both, curriculum and notes twice and continually told me that I have no chance with my approach… in the end I passed, I guess quite close to failing, but who wants to know afterwards