I don’t understand what is the rush to do mocks without knowing all the material? I didn’t do a mock (CFAI I might add) until two days before the exam for Level I. Seems to me just doing the blue boxes and EOC is enough until your fully prepared. I also don’t use Schweser except for the Qbank. Plan to take my first Mock weekend of the 22nd.
Yeah, agreed. If I’m 3 months removed from looking at, say, Quants, what the hell do I expect is going to happen when I just take a mock out of the blue? Hell, 3 weeks removed from a subject and I would struggle mightily.
(Inclined to write 3 days as well 
)
I’m with you nigelnyc. Take the time to really get a handle on the material (to the furthest extent possible) before testing yourself with mocks. Read through, condense, read condensed notes, condense again. There’s an argument to made that doing mocks will identify weak areas for further study but I feel like after a read through the schweser notes I have enough of an idea of where I need to focus that this strategy is not necessary.
Be prepared for the exam itself before writing mocks and you could save yourself some dissapointing, heartbreaking results in the 40’s. To each their own.
You make a good point. It’s why I’m going to do a full review before I take the CFAI mock…
Practice is certainly the key here. Whether you do Blue Boxes, CFAI Practice Problems, Assessments, Scheweser or any third party provider Mocks or QBanks. Try to Practice as much as you can. If you can connect with the topic while reading the vignette in first 2-3 minutes, you’ve won half battle. Next is answering those six questions, out of which 3 you can expect to get solved with the formula or tweaking the original formula. If you are not remembering the formula and still remember the content/concept of that LOS, I think just looking at Formula sheets/Flashcards throughout the day atleast for 3-4 times will certainly help. Rest questions would certainly come for minute details, which is difficult to mug up but if you have read the content thoroughly twice and noted them somewhere, you still can answer 1-2 answers correctly out of them. I personally feel that due to so much of pressure/stress in Exams (eagerly waiting for booze in evening), despite being confident about the concept, you may eventually have to guess some answers because no one can remember all those minute things from each LOS (example - “biased” instead of “unbiased” and you end up realizing that statement is correct)!
Also focus on those vignettes more where there is a cross references from different topics Ex- In PM, they include QM concepts. or including Der. in PM/Eq. This certainly tests the overall ability and if someone is consistently able to solve them or handle them efficiently (3/4 out of 6), they will certainly sail through!