Hi, I was wondering what people who successfully navigated Level 2 think of my current study approach. I started 20 weeks before the exam so I will have 2 revision weeks at the end. Monday to Friday day I am reading the study notes quickly but I am not doing the end of chapter questions. Instead I do 20 Schweser QBank questions on all topics covered with the difficulty set to easy and medium. On Wednesday evenings I do the 3 hour Schweser Online class. On Saturdays I do 60 questions on all topics (including topics I haven’t covered) with the difficulty set to Hard only. Should this be sufficient?
Depends on how clever you are. If you are really really smart it’s overkill. If you are really dumb, you wouldn’t have passed level I. You are probably in the middle and it’s probably a good amount of work but quality of study is very important. By quality I mean you are actually putting in enough effort so that you understand the topic you are covering. If you are reading the material and not understanding it then you are not putting in enough quality into your studying and are wasting your time. If it were me I’d do the concept checkers at end of the chapter. This will give a good idea if you understood what you just read (I almost always skip them, but know I should do them). If you are leaving only 2 weeks for review you need to make sure that you understand the material the first time round.
Also I have worked with a couple of people who failed level 1. They were very disciplined and were reviewing the material on schedule and consistently, I erroneously told them with that schedule and that amount of time they would be fine and the exam wont be a problem but they failed. They weren’t particularly dumb guys so I can only imagine they were not really putting in quality time and were just going through the motions of covering the material and not stopping to understand what they were reading.
Order of priority: Read notes do concept checkers do past papers do qbank/end of cfa institute chapter questions past papers are more important than qbank, but I saved them till the last couple of weeks. Concept checkers are targeted at ensuring you understand the material you have just read!
I like Q Bank because it’s a good way to quickly review material. If you don’t know the answer to a question then look it up in the notes or CFA texts to see what it is. This takes a bit of time but I find it really helps me fill in the gaps. Q bank got me through level II. I got lucky and scrapped through.
Thanks guys, The reason I am doing Q Bank instead of the concept checkers is so that I can continually keep reviewing the material I have already covered. If I am doing the Concept Checkers instead then I am only covering the most recent material. My biggest problem is that I alwasy understand the notes when I read them but as time passes the detail fades. For example, I did Quants a few weeks ago and was flying through all the quants questions. But each week that passes I am finding the quants questions harder as it is longer since I reviewed the notes…