I’ve read several people say that the CFAI practice questions at the end of each reading session were very helpful. In preparing for the L1 exam, is better to repeatedly go over the CFAI practice questions (memorize if possible) or spend that time doing the 3000 or so Qbank questions?
I did both…
I don’t think you need to memorize them but I’d definitely spend some time with the questions labeled as previous exam questions. Those were in my experience, and not surprisingly, very valuable for getting a feel for the test questions. People on this board tend to spend a fair amount of time dissecting some fairly obscure and contrived practice problems i.e. EPS calcs a half dozen different different stock splits and what-not. While those are certainly worthwhile for the sake of understanding the material, I think that alone will leave you unprepared for what you’ll actually see on the exam. My opinion is that there’s just too much material to be jacking around with brainteasers.
The previous CFA Exam questions are really helpful and you should do them all, but there are not that many of them. You have to be very careful about the difference between knowing how to answer the question and knowing what your answer was last time. The good thing about QBank is that there are a lot of questions so you keep seeing new things.
There are about 120 CFAI practice questions in the text books. I can’t recall seeing a single one of them on the test, but it really drives home the type of info that CFAI is looking for. Like i was shocked (in a good way) when I saw the test questions.