Did anybody use these? How useful were they? Thanks… LRM
I failed and used them. They are not very helpful in my opinion. I listened to/from work and every night before bed. It had a very low retention rate. A man just reads the text to you verbatim.
I listened to all of them for a month straight and thought they gave me a good idea of the scope of the exam material. It helped me determine which areas I already had some familiarity with, and those which were completely new. That helped me plan my order of study. I listened to tough sections like quant and FSA twice, and all the others only once. One of the problems with the discs is that it is hard to quickly locate a particular subsection or LOS, i.e. you essentially have to listen to the whole section over again to get to the part you are looking for. It is of course much, much easier to bookmark a page in the texts, or on QBank. Also, the reading is necessarily very monotone, and it literally put me to sleep on more than one occasion. My retention was next to nothing while I was drifting off (I don’t believe in subliminal retention). I may listen to the discs one more time as a general refresher, but from now on it’s stricly QBank and Secret Sauce, with reference to the Schweser books (and CFAI books for Ethics).
I thought that they were very usesful. Especially for ethics and economics. I listened to them on my drive to work everyday. I passed and felt they contributed to my succsess.
I just passed level I this June. I found it to be very useful and time-efficient for ethics section only. In other sections, someone else said it- it is very difficult to retain the information as the concepts are very dry and you will zone out. for ethics, the text the CFA institutue gave you is overly repetitive and lengthy - the audio CD is a good way to kill time if you commute to and from work. although I recommend listen to it more than once.
I’m currently using them now (kind of) I listened to the ethics section and thought it was very helpful. When I got to Quant (TVM) I thought it was pointless because he was telling you what you would be inputting into your calculator.