I thought only those people who didn’t have time to finish reading all the materials would fail. It seems that some people who studied really hard (and finished reading all materials and question banks) but still failed. That startled me.
Many people who take the CFA are not on this board and do not prepare accordingly. Many have a misconception. If you are on this board, you have heard nothing but horror stories about how difficult the exam is. If you really study and practice, you should be fine. Most Dec 07 test takers on this forum passed from what I saw.
Reading is not enough. If you look at the questions at the end of the chapters in CFAI books, you can see that. You should understand tricky parts and be confident with the material…
I read 3 CFAI books (approx. 1500 pages) & read the rest with Schweser. So I did go over all of the material. I also failed in December. My main mistake - practice questions. I think it’s very possible to understand the material and still fail. You have to be good with answering questions.
Also I should add that I haven’t taken a single finance/accounting course in my entire life so it was all fresh stuff to me. If you have a finance/business/accounting degree, you are really ahead of those of us who have had no exposure. Also, I did do practice questions but just not enough of them (approx. 700 Qbank, 720 Book 6, concept checkers, CFAI end-of-reading questions).
topher Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I read 3 CFAI books (approx. 1500 pages) & read > the rest with Schweser. So I did go over all of > the material. I also failed in December. My main > mistake - practice questions. > > I think it’s very possible to understand the > material and still fail. You have to be good with > answering questions. This is also one of the mistakes I made and failed in dec 07. I didn’t do enough practise questions to make sure I didn’t forget what I read.
In Dec 07 I read Schweser books 1,2,5 and I failed those sections (except ethics that was a joke) but passed the ones I didn’t read. How ironic. So my plan is not to read anything at all for the June exam… (jk) My mistake was I read too slow, this time I’ll read everything quickly and do as many questions as I can, and then review, and then do some more questions, and some more review, and I won’t be cheap like last year and I’ll buy the CFA practice exams…
Reading books is the easiest part. Practicing questions is more important to me; particularly the one that need computation. There will be tones of questions which give the more than enough information for computations.
Most questions on the actual exam, as opposed to the practice questions in CFA books, do not require calculations
hotdawg Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Most questions on the actual exam, as opposed to > the practice questions in CFA books, do not > require calculations and best way to check this and realize and utilize this info is to take 5 actual CFA level 1 exam (provided by CFA institute) at proper time like before first week of May so that some more revision can be done if required
Ya, it is more concept based type of questions, like the kind: if xxx and yyy change, which one of the zzz will be not the most likely to occur?
Destination.CFA Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- and best way to check this and realize and utilize this info is to take 5 actual CFA level 1 exam (provided by CFA institute) at proper time like before first week of May so that some more revision can be done if required Hi Destination.CFA Did you mean take 5 actual exams during the last one month OR must complete those exams before May and then spend one month (May) to do more reviews? since i made a tight schedule, I plan to finish the reading of 5 books 2 weeks before final exam, and practise questions among those 2 weeks. Should I speed up my resding and plan more weeks on practice?
you really need more than 2 weeks taking practice questions. i made the same mistake. you learn so much more by taking the tests… You have to get familiar with the way the questions are asked. You might freak out when you see how difficult they are.
reading is not enough. i read the curriculum twice and still failed… so dont go that way
read the stuff once, start doing practice questions, then use those as a gauge for your areas of weakness and reread accordingly. Do this ad nausem. then in May, take CFAI exams and do that again. Take as many questions from as many sources as you can afford. Its what worked for me and many other people I know. Also, don’t get hung up on the smaller weighted sections if your scores do not improve steadily after a period of time. In my case, my economics scores were dreadful and never improved past the 60% range. I threw my hands up and focused on FSA, Equity, etc. You can’t really game the exam, but you can at least put yourself in the best possible position to recieve a passing score.