This is slightly controversial and against the grain. But I’m not finding the material that taxing. I’ve done about 65hrs and completed schweser readings of Ethics, Quant, Eco, FRA, CF and 50% of EI. I should be finished with the schweser readings by 11/3/13 and the I’ll do the EOC from CFAI.
Am I doing something wrong or are some people thinking the same thing? All I keep hearing about is how hard L2 is compared to L1…but I can honestly say, that as of today. I don’t think it’s that much harder……
I have to agree with you, but then again you’re studying from the schweser book. Cliffnotes makes reading Tolskys War and Peace easy compared to the actual book. But if you’re rock solid on the CFAI EOC, power to you man.
Agree the material isn’t hard… Unfortunately I feel that it will be the WAY the material will be tested that is difficult. From what I can gather so far they will now test how well we can ‘apply’ what we’ve learnt rather than just remembering it…
its more to do with the item set format of the exam that makes L2 a different ball game…ive done the item sets for quants from CFAI books and i can tell you they are not the size of the item sets on actual exam…im estimating 1.5-2 pages of info on the exam vs.3/4 of a page EOC vignettes…thats what brings time into the equation
I got a later start and just finished up the FRA chapter and most ways through economics.
Think that the lease/inventory stuff is so well drilled in L1 that if it shows up it should be good for me. And had no torubles with EOCs.
The Intercop Inv and Pensions will need some extra time, but the EOCs again seem quite reasonable.
In all I feel alot better about the FRA section than I did about level 1.
I think KPR92 is right, a lot more focused so you can get to know the material better.
I do wonder privately if the Level 2 is hard narritive is a slight over compensation from a time where people all assumed level 1 was some huge weedout and didn’t try at all for level two and then failed…
I think it’s a personal thing. Some people can pick up small bits of many things very easily (perfect for level 1), but then other people such as myself do much better if we can just focus on a handful of concepts and “master” them, which so far describes level 2 pretty well. I definately fall into the second group and have the feeling you do as well.
L1 was an absolute cake walk compared to L2 for me. There is so much material you need to know for L2 it’s mind blowing. Translation, pension accounting, and all those damn equity / fixed income / derivative / PM / alternative investment formulas. Thinking about currency arbitrage and that stupid triangle still makes me want to vomit. CFAI will throw a million curve balls on the exam. You might think you got a problem right, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of the material, you likely missed it. There are very few questions that are straight forward. I remember so many people saying they nailed the 2012 exam and then failing it when results came out. Of course, the few folks on this thread might be the exception. If so, more power to you.
I’m in the same boat as the OP. I am not finding the material overly challenging. I’ve covered Corp Fin, Equity, FRA and almost through AI. The valuation is intense, but their are common themes in the calculations, just slight variations based on what is being evaluated (apologies if this was an obvious observation to others).
I have also found the material less challenging than I expected. Having said this, I expect a big slap in the face at some point. As people have already pointed out in this thread I think it’s going to be how the questions are presented that is really going to test whether you know the material and can bring it all together under pressure or if you just memorized how jumble around equations you’ve memorised (which worked for L1).
OP, have you been doing the CFAI EOCs? If you’ve just been doing Schweser EOCs you’re in for a bit of a wakeup call. Give them a go. Fear is good in my opinion, it’s dangerous to get complacent about this exam.
From what I remember in 2012, a lot of the overconfident people failed while the folks stressing the exam passed. Again though, more power to you if you think L2 material is easy.
All those who’ve been finding it easy will get a big slap in the face while writing the exam because of the time pressure. Like when you do an itemset from CFAI EOC, you dont have time pressure and you just read the itemset once and might start guessing the asnwer and quicly looking at the back to see if it was correct. but in the exam you might find yourself re-reading the itemset 3-4 times to confirm and reconfirm if that was what they were asking and you can no longer guess the answer, you have to get it right so that just costs us 25 minutes per itemset. and for each subsequent itemset we will have lesser and lesser time until our brain snaps and says fuck it, im guessing the rest…after the exam some of us will go home and cry cause we put all that hard work and nights of studying for this day but couldn’t properly answers the exam questions and that we have to wait another year if we dont pass…this is what I expect from level 2
I think for the average student (non accounting grads), the Level 2 exam is very hard. But the students posting in Analyst Forum are the high achievers/uppermost percentile which makes us a small unrepresentative sample for the average difficulty of Level 2. But I have no doubt that CFAI will give us the hardest of hardest itemsets in each topic so that only the upper percentile of the upper percentile will pass and once CFAI finds that a lot of upper uppers have passed, they will tweak the MPS to be slightly higher.
More failures mean more money for them. Thats why they give us an easy level 1 but hard ass level 2 . Dont believe me? Then why do they try to hook us with level 1 since they allow you to write it in June or Dec. but dont allow it for level 2.
Studying from the CFAI textbooks sure makes the concepts discussed in level 2 appear a little harder. You are given too many tiny details about a single subject and are expected to be able to apply and fit them all together into a whole.
I think studying from 3rd party providers may make the subjects appear simplistic, but then may also be missing some very important concepts.
‘Completing readings’ does not always seem to equal the comprehension necessary for problems solving in a time constrained environment. As you say: EOC are still before you.
