For Level I I studied strictly from the Schweser books and did very well. I was diligent about taking notes, doing all EOC practice questions and a lot of QBank questions. I wanted to study from the CFA books for Level II as I’ve heard Schweser isn’t sufficient and I’ve been doing so since early October (already finished Quant and partially through Port. Management). I’m noticing that the CFA books are considerably longer/dense…I’ll have to study 7 days a week if I’m still taking notes and doing practice questions to finish with a month for review. Has anyone else had experience with Schweser LVL II and could could confirm if reading from there is enough while doing EOC questions from the CFA books to confirm you understand the material. I feel that if I studied from the Schweser books I would also be finished with reading 2 months prior to the test giving myself more time for review on any areas that weren’t emphasized enough in Schweser.
I used a mix of both the curriculum and the Schweser books. Used the curriculum for Ethics, Quants, Economics, Equity and the rest topics used the Schweser. The bad side of the curriculum is that its structure is not much clear sometimes, you get lost when reading (lose the big picture of the chapter). Any day you could ask yourself “Where Am I into all this?” and that’s not much good.
The important thing is that I used EOC question of both set of books, so I had like hundreds of questions from them.
I consider the review part the most important stage of the whole preparation. Save the most time you can for mocks, review and feedback. Also avoid being stressed by time shortfalls. It is ok being stressed because the topic is hard, and not because you didn’t save enough time.