Hey guys, For those who’ve done it, what strategy did you take in studying ethics? I am through my review of the “other” stuff and per others’ recommendation saved ethics for last so I didn’t forget it all closer to the test. I will study out of the CFA cirriculum as opposed to Elan guides that I used for other stuff, but is it simply read through and try to digest? Did you take notes? Just trying to devise a plan of attack and wondering if anyone had a method that worked well for these “wordy” topics. Any help appreciated, thanks!
read through the Code of Ethics that they have on the CFAI website, it has a ton of examples and problems, prob don’t have to read the whole thing as it is massive, just scroll through & print the end of section problems. Study the same way as you should be with other sections- do all the problems you can find. Good luck, somehow they make the questions very tricky.
Read it from the curriculum thoroughly once now and once again in May. Make sure you do the questions in the curriculum as well. I didn’t pass last year, but did well on Ethics on the mock and the real test.
For the test, do you need to know the order of each of the 7 standards and sub-standards (i.e. be able to state that Standard II (B) is Market Manipulation)? Or do you just need to be able to identify when something violates the Standards and why?
no no, just identification- which standard it violates
You’ll need to know the numbers (is it a violation of Standard III or IV). Also play very close attention to the nuances and examples in the CFA books. On the actual exam, you’re going to see questions that draw really fine lines between two standards, and you have to identify which is the more applicable. For example, you know it’s a violation, and you know it pertains to both III and IV, but you have to choose and it’s difficult.
Hank I don’t think you have to know the numbers…can you back that up?
Read it one now, then leave it till last last ! First because there is some memory involved, so you don’t want to study it too soon. Also because I found that beyond the first few hours of ethics studying, the marginal gain becomes very low. So if you scored 30% on ethics before you read the stuff, 60% after you read it once, you will get 65% after you read it the sec time, and then it would be very hard to raise your score…So might as well spend your time on other stuff There are few things about gips and schweser seems to sum them up very well. I remmber seeing them on the exam, and they were repeated a million time in Qbank… Goodluck to all
you DONT need to know the numbers
thanks for the backup bhabib
Ok, so don’t worry about memorizing numbers. Cool, thanks. What are good sources for practice? Obviously EOC, I don’t think I have any Elan questions. Also found the pdf of 50 or so Ethics questions on the CFA website. Any other good sources? Thanks for your help guys!
thats pretty much it…straight EOC and Code questions are best
Hi all, is that pdf still up on the CFA site? Couldn’t seem to find it.
I scored above 70 in ethics by simply reading it through CFAI textbooks only 1st two chapters and the rest 2 (GIPS) from Shweser. The first three standards are wide and not that much tricky but from standard 4 to 6, they are tricky. Read and understand the examples well and make a summary when you read from ethics. Separate Recommended procedures and required procedures, they have a higher probability of being tested straight away. I made a chart of all standards and remembered their first letter as a proxy of the standard. For instance KIMM in Professionalism. K: Knowledge of the law, I: Independence & Objectivity, M: Misrepresentation, M: Misconduct. In this way you can remember the standards. Last but not the least practice well especially the EOC questions and examples. The questions are rare so fight with them and try to learn from them the maximum.
Thanks for the tips, mohammad.belaal