This thread is open ended for people who want to talk about efficiency / effectiveness of time spent in last two weeks.
took 2012 mock yesterday… noticed that my weak areas are equity and FRA (and I shoud be doing better in ethics)… I studied predominately from schewser and did EOC questions a I went along.
figure after reviewing the results, i can do the EOC questions for equity and FRA again to drill home some of the concepts and get tight in those subjects… figure this will be a good mix of practice problems + review… think that will be a good way to get a better handle on the big 2? worth it to do all questions (i.e. open ended, stand alone mult. choice) or just the vignette style ones?
then figure will review ethics leading into the last week… meaning re-read the CFA text for all the new ethics sections (and maybe the standards again… although quite lengthy… may speed read)
I’m a big believer in studying as opposed to simply doing mocks and redoing mocks and doing more mocks…Mocks have their place but are not the end-all be-all that it seems alot of people on here think they are. I do one, study for a couple weeks focusing on the weaker areas, then do another.
I’ll be doing a full read-through of ethics this weekend and then thats it for that section.
Days prior to the exam I’ll be focusing on Quant, Derivatives, and other heavily formulated chapters where I want the stuff to be fresh in my head. Most of FRA I understand, I will be doing just a review of SS 6 in the week prior.
bmer4444, some topics are very vast theoretically, but when comes to solving problems only 1-2 types of problems come, there is a risk of some strange/diff type of question from that topic, but for someone like me who is short on time(and was tooo lazy to read theory earlier), getting the basics down and solving Q’s and when having problem reviewing those theory is the best way.
I would strongly suggest against re-reading any CFA text in final 2 weeks, because they give too much irrelevant info and give bad return vs the time put in (during the exam)
Kromzo, check this out. Better to keep the discussions together.
The thing about practice tests is that they are essentially useless without having the reading finished and at least partially understood before. That said if you just have 2 weeks just drill as many equity and FRA problems as you can.
I do not simply re-read the CFAI texts. I have highlighted the entire books of all relevent material (stuff thats based directly on the LOS) and only focus on that. In addition I have manually written in notes for myself on the sides of the pages of the CFAI text. Also, I have made cue cards covering probably around 75% of all the LOS in the CFA books.
A mix of studying from the texts and EOC Q’s is what I focus on in between my periods of writing mock tests. I think this is much much better (atleast for me) then doing a mock, looking at the Q’s I got wrong, then doing another. They likely aren’t going to ask the same Q’s on the mock as on the real test. Some will be similar, but not the same.
I like mocks better, make notes of all the formulas I got wrong so I can review them in the last week. Also, its helpful to look at the solutions for the ones you got right as well just to make sure that your reasoning was correct.
I say if equity and FRA are your weakest sections, it’s absolutely worthwhile to do as many practice questions as possible. Definitely all the CFAI EOC ones (again). Everyone is different, but to me, having the heavily weighted stuff down 100% is very worth it. I’m okay sacrificing some quant, which makes me want to break out into hives anyway, in order to master even one more formula in equity.
I started a weekly course at the end of October. I was doing well over 15 hours a week since that time, closer to 20 hours most weeks. I’ve found the last two weeks to be very difficult to put in as many hours as I used to. At one point, the material got boring. I’ve done the EOC at least four or five times for every reading now. There are a couple of formulas that aren’t second nature (like valuing FRA) or aren’t worth memorizing (adjusted R^2, Treynor-Black) that I could probably focus on.
I’m going to keep re-visiting my cue cards to keep the formulas fresh in my mind. I definitely have the concepts down, but the formulas are easy to forget or mix up. I found the econ formulas (interest parity, international Fisher, etc.) and the free cash flow formulas were my weakest. Second to those would be the international pricing ones in Portfolio Management.
I’m finding that there’s so much material, that you almost have to select certain sections that you really enjoy learning and know them inside and out (ideally they would be FSA and Equities). Otherwise it gets very tedious and boring (Alternative Investments and Quants).