FoF is a joke.
Congratulation to all who passed, for those who didn’t …give it another trial and best of luck ! Anyone here can let us know what was the recipe of a great Pass ?reading both CFAI and shweiser manuels ? focusing only on Shweiser ? Did anyone cover only Shweiser manuals (+ Ethics from CFAI) and passed ? I understand that practicing exams for both is a MUST to pass ! Actually I have just registered today and only 4 months to go now… thanks in advance for all of your advices!
BarneyS, I used Elan, and didn’t open CFAI books after the first week. This goes against the grain, but I think that this notion of the importance of practice problems for L1 is highly overrated. I never did any practice problems (the Elan books don’t provide any) and only did 2 mock exams the thurs and fri before the exam. For the Quant time value of money section though I did make sure I knew the ins and outs of using a calculator by looking at their examples in the text. L1, as everyone will tell you, is a MEMORIZATION exam. This is not like the LSAT where they need to trick you and need serious logical reasoning skills. If you know the material underlying the question then it’s not a great intellectual leap to figure out what the answer is. I feel this whole idea of banks of questions and mock exams is just a prep provider marketing ploy. Now for L2, which I have not done yet, I imagine this method won’t hold, since they are item set questions.
I disagree about practice problems not being necessary, but to each his own. In my case, I thought I knew the info after reading a section, but a practice problem asking the question in a different way, or forcing me to re-work an equation logically, really helped nail the concept home. I mainly used Stalla, with the CFAI books for practice problems. I didn’t read the CFAI ethics, but I had the in-person Stalla lectures with Peter Olinto and he really helped nail that section too.
I agree to each his own. I find that I understand the concepts far better after brute force memorizing the important parts of the chapter, and then being able to see the big picture in my head.
congrats to those who passed, those who didn’t will get it next time
Thanks for the congrats. Honestly, the things that helped me the most: q-bank, secret sauce, a printout I made that had all the L.O.S., and YouTube/Google. Q-Bank: I did about 3000 questions (on top of multiple practice exams). This drilling really helped me out. Secret Sauce: Not the best for learning the material, but the best for realizing where your weak spots are. Read through the Secret Sauce, take notes of where your weak spots are, then learn more about them. L.O.S. Sheet: All of these can be on the exam, and you don’t want to miss any points. Save the doc (because you’ll print multiple copies.) Go through them, cross of what you know already, and work on what you don’t know. YouTube/Google: A lot of times you can read stuff, but it doesn’t really click. Do a search for stuff that isn’t clicking and more than likely, there will be a YouTube video explaining it. Some videos aren’t as useful as others, but it still helped me pick up a lot of quick/easy points on the exam. The main thing that helped me was realizing studying what I already knew gave me false confidence and I was wasting my time. Spend that time more wisely studying what you don’t know, it’ll be more challenging and frustrating, but it definitely will give you a higher score.
I didn’t realize that there were so many of us on this forum. I certainly hope the Level II forums is a lot busier than this place has been recently. Are you all going for Level II this year or chilling for a while?
LII forum was the most active one when I took it. So hopefully that’ll be the case for you as well.
I would think by intuition that L2 is most active. Getting past L1 is relatively much easier, so a natural bottleneck flows into L2 where many get weeded out
Congratulations for passing L1! and condolences for having to study for L2 again so soon
I only used Schweser, never even opened the CFAI books and passed with >70% in Ethics. All other areas >70% except Derivatives. Just an FYI to all those who are considering Schweser, you can definitely do it.