I recently graduated from McGill Universtity with a BCom Finance and I’m registered to take the CFA Level I exam on December 3rd. Today, I just about finished reading all of the books that came with the CFA registration. This gives me about 40 days until the exam. Do you think that I’m in trouble? I haven’t started doing any mock exams just yet, but I’ve been doing some EOC questions and I watched almost all Kaplan Schweser videos.
What would you suggest as a good strategy from now on? I have the QBank. Should I start from there, or maybe review all the EOC questions? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I currently don’t have a job, so I can technically study all day, every day.
CFAI EOC questions are very much like the exam questions since they are developed by CFAI itself. They are the least which you should do before appearing into the exam. Practice from QBank will give you the idea of your weaker and strong areas. Revise the weak ones and make your strong areas stronger. After that appear in mock so that you may get the experience of exam environment and gauge your stamina for sitting into the exam especially in the last moments of the afternoon session. Make sure you give your best shot in CFAI Mock and CFAI EOC questions as they are less in number and they are a kind of proxy to judge your position. The CFAI chapter end summaries are very helpful in revising especially in Level I make sure you go through them too. Good Luck
you newbs seriously annoy the hell out of me. Why would u even ask a question like that? Your in trouble if you dont know the material, plain and simple. Never once did I think like that back in the day. Put ur head down, get to work, and get it done. No excuses
Point taken. I agree. Although I believe I already know more than 80% of this stuff given my finance background, it’s maybe time to get some work done…
If you have a Bcom in Fin from Mcgill and didn’t do too badly then I’m sure 40 days is enough. It’s kind of annoying when you know 80% of the material, cos you have to spend all this time reading stuff you well understand to find the few parts that are new, I definitely think they need better subheadings.
Exactly! I really think they can fit this material in less than half the current volumes. It’s ridiculous in how many different readings you can find the same topics over and over again…
It’s funny, because when I sat for LI, I sat between two UPenn econ grads that were talking like this and both failed. I honestly think that in a lot of cases it can work against people. They often look at a concept and think they know it and move on, but miss the details that are tested.
yeah, like always you have to know the particular details that each test/syllabus focuses on rather than understanding the area in broad strokes. The devil for me is the terminology. The consolation is that if you know 55% of the answers and guess the remaining 45% then you will get, on average and in expectation, 70%. thank god for having only 3 options for your answer. I think this is why people seem to do better than they think.
samc, careful with you logic there. Assuming that 70% is the pass mark, knowing 55% of the answers will almost guarantee you a fail. Reason being is that for the questions you don’t know you won’t randomly pick an answer, you’ll choose the one that looks right to you. CFAI works hard to make sure that the wrong answers are the common mistakes people make. Hence, your success rate on the questions you’re not sure of may very well be below the 33% mark. A strategy I sometimes used when I was struggling for the answer is I’d try to eliminate the wrong ones, if I could find out why 2 were wrong it didn’t matter if I knew the third was right. This strategy works well on calculation questions where they may include components that should not be included in the answer.
Well Winkster that would probably explain why everytime I take a stab at an accounting question I invariably get it wrong. In which case maybe I have to just acknowledge when I don’t know and force myself to guess randomly rather than choose the one I think most likely. I do think some sections lend themselves to educated guesses better than others,.