I studied for the 2012 June exam by reading the material over and over again and making notes, doing all the EOC practice questions in Schweser and some in the CFAI books for important sections, but didn’t pass. I’m thinking about doing a more systematic approach.
Has anyone succeed by going through each LOS individually and writing down notes for each one. Will this take too long and do you think you’ll get bogged down?
Aligning your notes 1:1 to the LOS is certainly a good way to cover the material, but if you are like me and require some coherence in your notes rather than a list of mini segments each matching the LOS directly, I would read the LOS, the chapter and the summary before taking my own notes that may deviate from the list of LOS but still contain them.
I did your exact proposed strategy for Level 1 and passed. I plan on doing the same for Level 2, but of course doing extra EOC questions and mocks, and possibly some help from schweser. I liked this method because for the last six weeks i just studied out of my notebooks, which had concise summaries of the LOS along with practice problems i had worked out myself, memorized formulas via flashcards, and then did the samples and mocks. It also helped me because i remember more when i write stuff down.
My notes generally consist of a few important points for the chapter, and then any formula’s. Anything else and it’s too much to be of any use come review.
I wrote each LOS on an index card before each study session. Yeah, I have a whole fricken box full of them. As I read from the cfai material (there is no replacement for the way my brain works) I’d make notes on the flash cards, sometimes having to add several cards to a LOS. I covered every one of them. Test questions come from the LOS’s.
I would sit down each day and grab a stack of note cards to go through.
This was a lot of work and probably not the most efficient way to study by wrote memory comes into play. Plus, did pretty well on the exam.
I plan on ding something similar for II.
For Level 1 and 2 I found all of the LOS online.
I made one Word document with all the LOS and then made a second document to make notes under each LOS.
It will take a long time to complete, but on the exam you will get all the gift answers that people know are easy but have to guess the answer to because they never took the time to read the textbook properly.
I found this to be very helpful for lvl 1… I didn’t go with such for lvl 2 as i found most questions to be related to multiple topics rather than a simple 1:1 answer. oh and plus… time was a constraint on lvl 2.