CFA Level 1 in 3-4 weeks- doable?f

I wanted to get an opinion on my situation and as to how feasible it will be. As I’ve already committed to this route via my actions then there is little I can change. I’m doing the Dec 14 sitting of CFA Level 1. I have read through the entire Schweser notes once so far and have done about 30-40% of the CFAI EOCs without finding them too hard (with varying levels of success depending on topic), however that was a couple of months ago. So I’ve familiarized myself with the material and questions but not in a lot of depth. The reason why I’m not studying now is that about a month before the CFA I’m sitting two chartered accountancy exams which are currently taking up all my time (though the slight benefit is that most of the stuff covered in these is also to some extent examinable under the CFA). Once I’m done with those, I’ve got 14 days off work plus 8 weekend days or 22 days in total that I can commit to studying 100%, plus of course evenings on a further 8 days. Now theoretically (though not necessarily practically) I should be able to hit that magical 300h in that time but I realize that it is a tall order and I may reach burnout. As background however I did finance at uni (with my degree touching on about 80% of the curriculum save ethics), I’be been a Big Four auditor for 2 years and am most of the way through an accounting qualification so I can do accounting pretty much in my sleep. As such I feel I’m advantaged by my background but I won’t let that become a point of complacency. Taking all of the above into account, do you think me passing the CFA in December sounds reasonable? (worst case scenario I retake in June)

I have a friend that completed L1 last year and took two and a half weeks off work before the exam to study. He had a finance background and was generally intelligent. I guess it’s doable but I haven’t heard of many that go this route and succeed.

Why not register in June?

You should be fine if you hammer those three weeks. You’ve already done a lot of studying. If you can’t hack it in three weeks full time (150 hours) having already studied all of Schweser and 30%+ of EOCs, you’re going to have serious problems later in the program.

sure it’s possible.

I already registered a long time ago. I want to do Level 2 in June. Need to get as much CFA under my belt as I can to help hasten my escape from audit.

Once you said you will retake it in June… you know that you won’t go over it over 3 weeks… (you gave yourself execuse to just give it a shot and do it again in June)…

Hope it works… Good Luck

Worst case scenario… If you kept studying at least 8 hours (every day) … you can manage to plug in around 180 hours…

Which is 60% of minimum hours needed… given that you did 30% of EOC… i will tell that 10% will be how lucky you are in the exam :slight_smile:

What about practice Exams? CFA Mocks?

I have no idea how you managed to interpret that from what I said but it is not the case at all. Do you think I want to waste 3 weeks of my holiday allowance and a ton of my own money? I want to be doing Level 2 in June.

What about them?

My plan is to go through all the EOCs in the CFAI again and then start hammering out mocks, the Schweser Q-bank and repeating the EOCs. If any concepts are particularily challenging I will reread the notes for them.

December 14? Not trolling, but I was pretty sure the exam is on December 6th

December 6th, 20 14

It’s definitely possible, since you’ve seen a lot of the material and have good accounting chops. It all depends on whether you actually put the time in and how well you test under pressure.