I was a stalker of AF during levels 1 and 2. Never signed up but always watching from a far.
Level 3 decided to join the community and started posting immediately. Not sure if this year was an outlier but there seemed to be only a handful of repeat posters. I can’t tell you how much posting and answering/asking questions benefited me.
I see now a lot of folks coming out of the woodwork who never made a peep on the forum. Some passed and some failed. But from my quick assessment all who posted regularly passed comfortably. Everybody benefits from the questions. My advice is this: get involved! It literally feeds your appetite to push through.
Shout out to the repeat posters, you know who you are.
Feels fuc*ing great to be done. Let this be motivation to the class of 2020.
Most definitely I would. This forum helped me a lot just like the OP said. Hence it’s the for me to give it back my bit, if that could help any of the candidates.
Good point Voyager. Getting involved in the threads also serves as a constant review process. You can be studying one topic but then quickly go through something relating to another topic just because it came up on AF.
I couldn’t agree more Voyager. I was mostly silently watching at LI, but when doing LII (in 2017) I was very active, both in asking and trying to help out others and it was great how some discussion led to getting the grasp on several issues (I remember there was an erroneous swap blue box question which we tore into bits and pieces, and it was late at night, haha good old days).
For LIII I had significantly less time, but mainly be the end I got quite a few tips/clarifications by posting questions or answering.
I think most of us will leave eventually. After couple of months you will forget most of the concepts specially of level 3 and with rapidly changing curriculum you will not be able to provide much help to new candidates. By that time most of the new candidates will get settled with third party providers so that discussion will also be closed. Our value addition will decrease and so will our interest eventually in the AF.
Same for me, I read/commented on my commute every day before L3 and just read a couple of threads for L2 & L1. Even though the curriculum is changing I still think there is value in relaying first hand what the AM section is like and how it’s different to L1 & L2. There is no way I would have started mocks as early as I did unless I had read how important that is on here before so hopefully some words of wisdom now and again will still be useful to next years candidates. Besides, I want to laugh at how many ‘tells’ are found next year!
I signed up long ago but never posted on here, sometimes I googled something about CFA and AF would show up so I’d read on. For some reason ever since I signed up for L3, I am starting to check the site more often, maybe I will get more involved during this last level, but not a lot too, sometimes interacting often could be a waste of time, OR, it could be demotivating when you see other candidates preparation and you feel under prepared (you may not be, others may be over prepared!).
It’s interesting that in China we typically build up study group (mostly via WeChat) and share knowledge on CFA materials with each other. It turns out that the pass rate will then be much higher (e.g. over 75% for L3 I think) within the small community.