I gave level 1 few days back. The exam went well except that I had to guess on 7-8 questions in afternoon session with no time left. After the exam, I have been thinking about the strategies which I took for the study and the strategies which I should have taken!! Two possible strategies 1. Do Schweser thoroughly with question bank and all tests 2. Read Scweseer material, dont give a lot of emphasis to Qbank. Make a list of important concepts and study them from CFAI curriculum ( read the topics over and over) and do all CFAI end of chapter questions. (ofcourse to make a list of important topics is a subjective thing, but can be done - say 10-15 topics from each study session) I was somewhere in the middle of the 2 strategies as I started strategy 2 in last month of studying. I know there are a lot of people in this forum, who did not refer to CFAI curriculum and will still pass and I know many people in the past who have done that. However, I think that the best strategy is to study selective topics from CFAI curriculum. I did that and it worked. If you guys remember questions like true zero, and negative sharpe ratio were all from the curriculum. I dont know about stalla, but none of this stuff was in schweser. I personally believe that if you study only from Schweser you will be on the border line of passing - as the Schweser material tests and the actual test are VERY different - This is a strong argument!! Any thoughts??
I have some thoughts. Selective studying, are you serious? I’m sorry to pop your bubble but nobody here is psychic, so we dont really know what CFAI will question us about come next exam. So the best strategy with a ‘sure chance of passing’ would involve covering all the topics covered by the LOS. I hate to say that the first strategy wasn’t very innovative. Really, I think what everybody tried to do was read (and retain in their head) as much as possible given everybodys time constraints. So obviously, the logical thing to do is work the q bank and tests after you are done with the guides. I can say this with confidence that you should not try to form a relationship b/w strategies and the pass rate, your conclusion is shouting ‘data mining bias’
K, true zero is in schweser guys come on
I did not mean selective studying. What I meant was doing Schweser material in full but doing selective topics from CFAI curriculum also. Relying completely to one studying material without refering to CFAI is not good at all.
hkalra , could you post the topics that are in CFAI but not in Schweser? Sort of like a CFAI minus Schweser list? Are they a lot or just a handful?
I did all of the Schweser books and never looked at CFAI books EXCEPT Ethics and FSA. I read FSA cover to cover in the CFAI, and in the morning session, I was almost 100% on every single FSA question. Afternoon, I was maybe 100% on all by 3 or 4 of them where I had to take educated guesses. So worst case, I think I got a 90% in FSA which isn’t bad considering its worth 20% of the test. If you are a fast reader, I say go for CFAI. I will definitely focus more on those if I pass L1 and am studying for L2.
All topics are covered in Schweser but they are not discussed in detail in Schweser. Ofcourse, it is not possible to study everything from CFAI, so I suggest reading selective topics from CFAI. Topics like, P/E…ratios, elasticity of demand curves, cost / demand inflation. the list can go on…1-2 topics from each chapter. what I realized was that out of some important topics - the real test picks up questions from CFAI curriculum not in the study material
Schweser focuses on addressing the LOS specifically. CFAI will give you the detail, history, preamble, the hard core stuff, trends, examples, and optional reading. While Schweser is a safe bet, it doesn’t hurt to go through CFAI for stuff that you are not comfortable with. For example, I didnt go through CFAI for topics like TVM, NPV etc. because we have been doing this since school. And I must say that Schweser does not provide adequate material on Ethics and GIPS.