Mostly wanted to share some of the mistakes i did while preparing for CFA Level 2 2015, which I hope none of you would repeat.
Starting with general perception of CFA L2, I agree that it is one of the biggest exam i have faced till now especially when you are working fulltime. Anyways my takeaways :
-
At any cost do atleast few properly timed mock exams( I don’t care kaplan or CFA mock). I did lot of mocks but none of them were timed, so when the real thing came i was so short of time on both AM/PM that i had to completely blind guess few Q’s. It was a real struggle finishing the exam on time.
-
Can’t emphasize again the importanace of EOC’s and BB’s(yea i know some of them are more than 2 pages long) but they are worth it.
-
Focus: Maybe the most important thing out of all theses which i unfortunately lack, I agree that reading the kaplan books again and again do help in retaining things and everytime u discover something new but while reading those u must be focused on each and every line, don’t try to rush through the topic in order to keep up with your schedule/plan which I unfortunately did.
-
Do makeup a schedule/plan for the exam…i would suggest making up few backup schedules/plans in case you r lagging behind your original schedule(which i always)
-
Kaplan vs wiley…Idk i would leave to the rest of guys…but yes i found wiley Qs to be more concept based than kaplan…but then i did noty find any vignette based Q’s in wiley
-
Q bank…did not had time to do it so cant comment on that.
-
Start as early as possible…dont leave mocks till the end…maybe pickup few mocks somewhere in feb/march
-
CFA online Q’s are must
-
Like me you can afford to mess up few less weightage topics but then do make sure u ace FRA/Equity(Given that they still have Max weightage)
-
For revision i think a little more than a week should be enough…some do Q;s in the last 10 days…some revise…upto u…i went with revision
-
Another important thing would be picking up a startegy on how to approach Q’s in level2…some read the whole essay and then start to answer…some read Q’s then essay…some go Question by Question…and some like me are completely clueless **** and end up mixing all those startegies(dont do that…maybe in one or two topics u could)…I find Question by Question strategy little fast and useful in my case since i was always behind on PM/AM
so these were some of the things i did right/wrong in CFA Level 2 2015…and to all those who sadly did not make this time irrespective of the level …just wanted to share the first post which i read on this forum a couple of years back and it says CFA is not a race(yes it’s not a rat race, or dog race or cat race or anyother f***** race), It;s a Marathon, so hang in there.