Over the years I’ve strongly advised candidates to practice from past Level III essay exams. These are the only actual exams released by CFA Institute so it will be silly not to benefit from this resource. When working through past papers keep the following points in mind:
The curriculum is updated every year and hence not all questions are relevant. In particular, there have been major updates to Asset Allocation and Fixed Income in 2018. Please be careful before diving into past papers.
The guideline answers provided by CFA Institute are quite detailed. They often show the different ways of answering a particular question and tend to provide more explanation than needed. If you start writing answers the same way, chances are that you’ll not finish your exam on time.
Look at the most recent exams (2015, 2016 and 2017) towards the end when you are done with the Level III curriculum. I recommend solving these papers in an exam-like setting.
During your regular study you can refer to earlier exams (2014 and before).
I used Arif Irfanullah video tutorials for all three levels and in my opinion its super useful (and probably the best series out there in the market) for covering all the essential concepts tested during the exam. I highly recommend everyone to purchase the same from IFT website as it will serve both the purpose of saving time and exhaustively covering the key takeaways needed for the exam. Its turned out to be exceptionally helpful to me! I passed all three levels at one go only due to his video series.
Haha. Nice to see you Flashback. I was away after LIII results and was quite busy with my job. Hope you are doing great as well.
Just wanted to pay a small gratitude to Arif Irfanullah for his contribution towards making my CFA journey successful. No referral or referrer fees indeed!!