Hi, As I begin my study for LI, I am faced with an important decision - do I take the time and effort to prepare and write (by hand, not computer) my own notes, or do I purchase prepared notes from a leading test prep provider such as Schweser’s notes? Before you jump to an opinion, here are some insights and conditions: - I am single, 23 years old, working 40 hours a week only. - I have a desire to not only pass the exam, but to actually learn the material and retain that knowledge for as long as possible. The only factor that I am concerned about is time - will I have enough time from now until June 5th to adequately prepare notes AND study from them? Thanks for all your help, CFA Level I vets!
from your second point I think taking your own notes is definitely good. I didn’t take any notes for level 1 but if I pass, I plan on to try taking my own notes for level 2
Here is what I did: -Not single (but GF lives 700 miles away), 22, working 40/hr/wk -Same desire as you I wrote my own notes during my pass through the CFAI texts, after that I NEVER looked at them again and I bough Schweser. I think the writing was helpful for drilling down some of the concepts but also added a TON of time to my initial pass through the material, which I think helped me forget a lot of the stuff I covered early on. The notes were very helpful for remembering econ graphs and certial formulas. I think that I retained a lot of the knowledge, however, I am fairly certain I did not pass. I think that when I am studying again, I will take notes from the Schweser books, THEN read through CFAI to get the minutia, highlighting the important stuff. I took notes without the real intention of using them, but more of a way to ensure I was actually reading and processing the material. All said, it does add a lot of time to the process.
Agree with nuppal there, making the notes was kind of helpful but it was very time consuming and I never looked at them again. Heres what I did: I underlined all the important stuff (very neatly) in the CFAI texts I read Schweser, absorbed alot of information and wrote it down in the margins on the CFAI texts I found that writing down formulas everytime you come across it helps you remember them I made notes again in a little notebook while reviewing A week before the exam I was nuttily reading all the material and (not surprisingly) I found info that I had missed before/failed to focus on, and I made a final 4-5 pages of imp stuff Never read the notes again though…so yeah just do what suits you best. I’m sure you know from experience what works for you
Sundusg, Do you not remember? We did it together… There is a reason we were both distracted.
I will share some of what I did in terms of making my own notes for the Dec exam. And for fun, -I am not single, 24 years old, working 45-50 hours a week -I have learned the material before in school and whilestudying for other professional exams, so my desire is to retain the knowledge and to pass. I bought the Schweser notes and read through them once (took like 5 days), and after the first time through I made photocopies of the key concepts pages. The 30 pages (could be more/less) of key concepts are the essence of the curriculum material that you must have in your memory in order to pass! Then for econ I drew the graphs next to the paragraphs of key concepts. If you have an understanding of why graphs appear the way they are then you have gotten the econ concepts down good. And drawing the graphs definitely helps understanding. Similarly, I made some minor modifications/added notes to the other key concepts pages and then I have my little 30 pages of the most important stuff. (this note making process took like 2 days) I read through the little notes pack once more before the exam and did not do any practice problems. So that was how my 7 total days of studying went. Making your notes from scratch is too time consuming, so just add your notes to what’s readily available. I am not sure if there are key concepts pages in the CFI texts, since I read none of it. If there is, then you can use those instead of the study guides’ and save some $$.
I started with CFAI texts… read through all of them except Derivatives & AI. While at this I took tons of notes and this helped drill down some important details. I then bought Schweser and read through all of them except Ethics. My only problem was that I never really reviewed my own notes later in the game as much as I would have wanted. With Qbank, CFAI mocks and tons of material to review, I definitely ran out of time to review my own notes. Do I think I will pass? Hmm… time will tell!
Thanks everyone for your great feedback, it was very insightful. In summary: - It seems as though those individuals who have prepared hand-written notes have found that, while useful to a certain extent, there was generally not much time left to review these notes. - Graphs were very helpful for the economics content. I think nuppal’s comment really struck a chord with me: "I took notes without the real intention of using them, but more of a way to ensure I was actually reading and processing the material. " I think that at the end of the day, this is probably my primary objective as well, as my eyes have a tendency to temporarily and miraculously go blind when reading a dry or complex piece of text. I hope none of you suffer from this. =)
While writing your own notes will make you spend a lot of time on the material, it might not be the best option. You have to think about what you can do with that time instead. An alternative could be to purchase some software where you can practice answering questions, and aim at responding to some 3000 questions (which is a number I’ve seen mentioned on these boards). You’ll probably retain the material better after having worked some 3000 examples in the test bank compared to having made hand-written notes. It might not be possible to do both, and even if it is --> you might want to spend that additional time on something else such as seeing friends rather than studying 7/24. Also: there is a risk that you focus on some particular LOS from a slightly different angle than that intended by CFA Institute. If you buy some study pack, my guess is that those who wrote it have used their judgment collected from previous years of writing up notes for these program, and so will focus straight on the core of some particular LOS. They’ll also target each LOS from the “command word” given, such as differentiate between a “compare and contrast” to a “calculate” or “evaluate”. If you write your own notes, you might miss on little things like that. I didn’t take any notes at all - apart from those occasionally jotted down in the margins of the Schweser books. It’s not that I consider it a total waste of time, but I preferred using my time in a different and (for me) more effective way.
I think whether or not you take notes is purely a function of personal perference. I took extensive notes for L1 and I think it helped a great deal. However, I agree with others here that it was more the process of taking the notes which was important. I re-read them later on, but not all that often. I have now started to study for L2 and having learned from last year’s L1 experience, I have changed my approach slightly. I read each chapter carefully, highlighting the key elements. Then I type up my notes, making sure that I don’t copy from the book but put the information down in my own words - this way I feel that I retain a much greater amount of the information and the notes become infinitely more readable/usable afterwards. But as i said, think that this is a personal choice and depends very much on the way you learn best.
Took Level 1 in Dec 09. Started studying in April 2009 from CFAI text. Bought Schweser in mid September. Feel confident (but keeping fingers crossed). I took handwritten notes for each reading on unlined paper and highlighted, starred, underlined, and bolded all the important stuff. On the top of each page the I had the reading number and chapter description. From 1-74. I still have the indentation on my index finger from holding the pen and highlighters. After I completed a major section I kept all the relevant notes in a color-coded, labeled folder (i.e. Red folder labled “Ethics, Readings 1-5”). I thought I was going to go through all my notes during my review, but I ran out of time. Instead, on the topics or readings I was weak in based on Schweser, I re-read THOSE notes instead of flipping through the text, which I find annoying. The whole process is time consuming and a pain, but I found it to be beneficial. Writing stuff down makes it easier to remember.
+1 I agree with the above posts. Especially the “personal preference” note. Different approaches work for different people. I found that typing up the notes and then printing them out worked well for me. I would often find mistakes, or improvements, and amending the notes and reprinting was easy to do. I soon realised that typing can be a slow approach (if you’re not a speed typist) so I instead used my home printer (which has OCR) to scan the notes and then copy and paste them into Word. Then it was just a case of summarising the notes to reduce the page count from say 20 (average reading in Schweser) to about 3 or 4 pages. And this was the part that really worked for me! By paraphrasing the notes I had to understand the material (you can’t summarise something unless you understand it first) so by paraphrasing the text I was forced to understand. I did go on to use the notes, e.g. studying on the commute to work. P.S. I studied Ethics last so only found out about the copy write rule at the end of my study, and by then it was too late 
passed L1 last June and took notes the first few months while reading texts. used them very little in review. you’re better off getting throuhg the text without taking notes, make flash cards, and spend more time on practice tests and questions. repeitition is what counts and ingrains the stuff in your head, not writing things down once, and reviewing haphazardly. don’t waste the paper and ink, good luck!