LII Study Plan - Advice

Hi All, Before all of you badass LIII candidates move over to the LIII forum, was hoping to see if anyone could shed some thoughts on my study plans for LII. I started studying for LI after Christmas 2007 and thought I had sufficient study and review time. I used Schweser for 85% of the material and CFAI for 15% of the exam. This time around I plan starting to study after thanksgiving as I have heard from everyone that LII is a beast. I plan on reading the CFAI text for FSA, Equity and Ethics and then rely solely on Schweser and Qbank for the prep and review. Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BCH

Sounds like you know what you are doing. Just know the material inside and out. GL

Anyone think to review L1 before starting in on L2??

cmbakerj, I plan on using Schweser’s Book 0 to brush up on LI material that will be the base for some of the LII material.

The best money you can spend to get a few extra points is enrolling in John Harris’ Accounting workshop. It took me 3 tries to pass LII, but I took John’s class each time and scored >70 in FSA each time. I cannot stress how valueable this mini review course is and how good he is at explaining the material in a way that it makes sense (rather than just telling you the answer).

An extensive review of Level I will not be needed.

I’ll be honest in my evaluation of my study plan. I started first week of April and studied exclusively from schweser. My goal was to finish second week of May. I did. I reviewed the whole material from secret sauce. Also, I must add that while doing the material for a month and a half, I did 30-60 qbank questions for every study session, this helped re-inforce the concepts and i believe is the best way to learn the cfa material. From may14-may21, I reviewed the entire material. may 21-28 or so, I took schweser tests. Because I work long hours I took half a test on a week day. All this while, I would conintue to review areas of difficulty such as FSA for me. Then from may 30 - June 4, I did all the CFA mock and sample exams. June 5 and 6, I reviewed the material again from secret sauce. On the test, I felt FSA wa extremely super duper easy. I was weak in FSA mind you 2 weeks before the test. The FSA on the test was so simple that there is a good chance I scored over a 90% on it. Equity was ok but not bad, very doable. Alternative Investments was very easy. What did screw me as Fixed Income. I urge everyone to be careful with Fixed Income. Same with Portfolio Management, make sure you know it in superior detail. In fact, I would urge you to read Fixed Income and Portfolio Management from the Text. Ethics is easy once you do the sample and the mock, its very similar. Read the CFA book for ethics. Quant was easy. Corporate finance seemed easy to me on the test but let me tell you that till 5 days ago, I would have failed the corporate finance on the test. The sample exams really helped out. But honestly, corp finance is a medium difficulty range topic, it could go either way. Good news is that FSA is easy, for all you non-accounting inclined folks and the guys at the test center who retook the test said that it was the same easy FSA last year too Economics can go either way. So I have given a topic by topic break down and my timeline and method. I believe my timeline was crunched my method very effective. It was a long long long wait to see the pass. What an awesome feeling! I wish all of you the very best!

good bye level II forum!

thanks for the insight preet, appreciate it. nodes, that is a good point nf reading PTF from the CFAI text, the text isn’t too big so definitely doable. thanks jalmy for the info.

Just an FSA comment here: I am no accountant, but I did really well on FSA and I used CFAI for learning and Schweser practice test questions for review. I thought it was pretty easy on the test, but maybe I just got lucky and hit a series of questions I happened to know well. I felt like I knew the material pretty well though.

don’t underestimate ethics and read the “optional” sections.

any particular order of study suggestions ? anyone ?

I just followed the order of the Study Sessions. You’ll find that there’s more overlap between the sections this time around, so it may take you multiple readings for everything to really click anyways. As with L1, I learned more in the last month than I did in the previous 3 or 4.

bannisja Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > don’t underestimate ethics and read the “optional” > sections. Cosign…Sigh!

For those with unlimited time and money. Read the CFA books, go thru the Schweser notes, finish with the Stalla video lectures. Do all the exercises from the CFA books (yes, all). If there aren’t any exercises, use the ones in the study guides. I remember vividly a couple of questions that unless you had read the CFA books, you were very likely to get wrong, just b/c the study guides didnt have those specific sentences rephrased:) With 120 questions, you cant take that chance. If you’re committed, stay committed.