First off, congrats to everybody who passed today. I know you’re excited and probably felt a weight lift off your shoulders. To everyone who passed and failed today, I still hope that you all will still poke your heads into the L2 forums to assist all of us newcomers to the L2. My question though… What’s the best way to tackle these? I’ve slowly started studying and have practiced a few of them. For the long one’s, I tend to forget important information by time I get to the questions and then waste a lot of time scanning again looking for the info to answer the question. Did you guys underline important info along the way while reading or does it just take practice, practice, practice to get to the point of completing them quicker?
The only tricky thing about vignettes is to remember to read them through before answering, because CFAI will put one final number in the last sentence to make the puzzle fit. Other than that it’s not really that big a departure from the normal format. Also, learn to scan the text to catch numbers and important keywords (especially in ethics). My feeling is (this could be distorted by time though, I honestly barely remember anything about the exam at this point) that 2-3 questions will be relatively basic, while the the remaining 3-4 are either tricky or difficult. So if you are comparing L1 vs L2 it’s really just a matter of getting the easy ones right and focusing on the few tough ones. I fretted about which prep provider to choose for L2, because as far as I know neither Schweser nor Stalla provide a question bank in the vignette format, but in the end it didn’t really matter - you still have to know the material really well. No real shortcut with respect to the format.
There is a small tip…as Billy said…first 2-3 ques are basic…so read 2-3 ques first…then imagine the info you need to find…then look at vignettes…read through 1 time, highlight what you found…take them out and answer these easy first…that make you get more confident and eliminate the info already used…then read remain quest…then read vignettes again and answer the remaining…If you tell me that you can’t do it for the first 2-3 quest…then it is a problem…review our knowledge for that section…if you can’t make through the easy quest, you can never go far with the later…