The econ book seems very light as to what we need to understand. I do have a finance degree with 4 econ classes under my belt. Anyone else feel the same way?
That’s what I thought too. I was surprised at the light amount of Economics material on the exam. I majored in Math but I’ve taken around 5 Econ electives throughout my career. I was surprised to see that I won’t have to analyze anything like isoquants, isocost, or any other micro- or macro-economic factors to the depth which I had anticipated. edit: OOPS, I am talking about the CFAI Econ material in general, and not the Schweser notes.
Couple of things about Econ on L1. 1. From reading thro the posts in the L1 Forum, you would have seen repeatedly people saying the following things a. Econ is a large amount of material. It is a BEAR, at best. b. Even people with a Econ Major have not been able to max out on the Econ score. c. The folks who learnt the text (which does not obviously include me) and answered the question the way CFAI expected got above the 70% scoreline. (I got 51-70 both times, 1 a fail in June and a Pass in Dec 2007). 2. Lots of folks did agree at the end of the exams in both June and in December that the Econ did throw a lot of people off, especially with the way the questions were worded. 3. I am stating this from a 2007 standpoint, though. I am aware of the fact that quite a lot of the material esp. the Global econ part has moved over to L2 this year. You need to understand the relationships, and correlate among them clearly enough to answer the questions. However, Econ by itself is only 10% on the exam and there in lies the tradeoff that helps you decide how much is enough. CP
Econ is really confusing. I had the same problem until October. When I started doing the revisions in Novermber, I made 1 to 2 page summary of each Reading in Economies from Schweser. It helped me very quickly pick the similarities & differences between the readings (especially Fiscal/Monetary policy). I kept revisitng those summaries almost every other day in last 2 weeks & I remembered everything ‘important’ in Econ on exam day. It helped me a lot to memorize the Econ concepts. I think I scored well on Econ (70% +).
I really don’t find econ very confusing…just hard to remember!!And reading the above posts am beginning to get a bit jittery about the quality of coverage by Schweser… It’s not that I wanna max Econ as such but given that I find it relatively easier(as compared to the other modules) would like to cover it as much as possible…
I found Economics easy to understand when I was reading CFAI materials. However, several questions on the actual exam and practice exams were very challenging for me.
Part of the challenge of the level 1 exam (especially for econ) is that there are a lot of questions that ask you to solve two questions for one answer. Like cpk said, it’s all about understanding the relationships. There will be many questions that say…if something goes up/down, how does that effect these other two things? Therefore you will need to know two different relationships for that one question.
FWIW - I read the Schweser econ material multiple times, and did tons of Qbank questions, and still scored <50% on that section on the exam, as did a bunch of my friends that took it. I passed Level 1, and I would urge you not to get hung up on Econ. It was truly a beast. Like others said much better above, those questions on the exam represented the most confusing on the entire test in that it was heavy on the 2-parters, and you need to have a thorough grasp of all the realtionships to be able to reason through them. Learn the stuff as best you can, but keep it in the back of your mind that your FSA, Etics, Equity Valuation, Fixed Income, etc. scores are much more relevant towards your passing score.
economic was my strongest subject going into Dec 07 exam and I failed it
I totally agree with the advice. I failed level 1 in December and despite doing economics several times I got between 50&70 on the exam. The questions are tough and the probability of getting 40% of these questions wrong is high. In other words it is not a scoring subject and if you want to score the effort that you will put in to do well you might as well divert towards more scoring subjects. Keep in mind IMO - CFA is about knowing concepts (65%) and test taking strategy (35%).