Econs was one of the two culprits that made me fail Dec 2015. While I acknowledged that I didn’t cover the second good enough , I covered the entire Econs syllabus, yet scored below 50. My major headache was micro, e.g remembering where a line intercepts a particular curve in the exam.
what is the best approach to this subject?
Yeah lots of people hyped up Econ would be difficult on the actual exam and different to what you learn at uni. But really it was no different to what pops up on exams at uni. I managed to score over 70%, with a reasonable amount of effort. Yes, one of my two undergraduate majors was Econ, but I still think the curriculum and Wiley study notes and videos in particular do a great job covering the concepts.
With Econ I personally find that if you understand the material and can explain it on a whiteboard to someone else, you should be in pretty good shape for most questions on exam day.
A possible issue is that when you read a text all you see is the end-product of a bunch of graphs/formulas. Then trying to memorise this without understanding could lead to some strife. However, seeing the gradual build up of concepts (from the most basic to the more complex) in videos in live time helps me to better understand and retain the material.
So a approach (may or may not be the best)
-> watch videos
-> pause and reconstruct what you see on your own; ask why that line has to intersect the curve at that point ; build sound economic intuition/reasoning; the more simple logical associations you can make in your learning, the easier econ becomes
-> Actively test your understanding with CFAI “blue box”, “end-of-chapter” and “topic area” test.
All the best with your preparation !
Hi guys,
you mean by the “blue box” and “topic area” tests, the few questions in CFA material, about a specific LOS ?
I know it’s a stupid question, I’m really sorry, but getting confused little bit
thx
No need to “slay” Economics – it’s a relatively small part of the CBOK.
Econ was tougher on mock exams than the actual exams I found so if you can understand it for the mocks come exam time you’ll slay it. My recommendation is to really think of why what they say is true. For example if they say that government plans to increase interest rates to cool down an economies growth, understand what that will affect. It will cause bond interest rates to increase, which causes the price of them to decrease, which causes…, which leads to…, etc. A lot of the questions will state something occurs and you need to understand the effects of it. If you keep asking why things occur from 1 event you’ll get a really good understanding of all the connections that stem from an event occuring.
@ fatym - > Sorry should have been a tad clearer.
So by “blue box” I meant the examples in the CFAI curriculum which are in blue colored boxes.
The questions after each reading are what I mean by End-of-Chapter (EOC) questions
Then in your CFA Institute candidate resources section online, you get access to 10 topic area based practice tests.
Finally, towards the last couple of weeks you can attempt the CFA Institute mock exam and any other mock exams you can find.
@Lampossible your my hero, thx for the insight, I haven’t yet use the CFA resources, that’s why . until now I read the material in shweser and do the concept checkers ( end chapter questions in shweser) and the the end of chapter of curriculum, trying to save the question bank ( CFA website, shweser, stalla …Etc) for the 2nd revision, and the mocks for the last 2 weeks … I hope it will work.