It’s not so much that you can’t pass. The CFA is made to build on each other. If you don’t remember it by the time you take L2 and L3 you are just wasting time now.
A ph.d proffesor once told me she did that. (pass after 2 weeks, but who knows)
He said he had NO business background. Maybe that was an exaggeration. I have an MBA from a top school, and I’ve still had to work my a-- off. Although I have friends who majored in accounting or econ in undergrad and passed the exam saying Level 1 is so easy anyone can do it. My guess is that if he’s legit, he’s a philosophy grad student with a business-related undergrad. Either way, he came here to ruffle feathers / brag.
Not sure if your real. But either way if so your awesome. People need to relax, and understand that getting the charter has to do with mastering the material and work experience. No need to freak out cause some dude can pass “LEVEL 1” in less time studying than you. Most of my classmates with math/finance backgrounds have studied around 3-5 weeks. One of my friends passed with flying colors in December after studying for 2-3 weeks again a math/finance background around a ‘A’ gpa. Realistically; -Each schweser book requires 5-7 hours to read straight. Thats about 40 hours for all the books. That is roughly 3 days without sleep. If you have the academic aptitude for it, it is possible. Personally for ethics, I have gone with schweser mostly. I would read all the Schweser material then right away do all the 50 questions. Learn the main tricks and continue. Then when your doing the mocks, for ethics usually pinpoint the one majorly wrong answer, then break it down to the final two. Based on the pattern of answers you are seeing. Then go back to schweser and do all the 50 questions 1 by 1 again, checking the answer. There is a general pattern to ethics after a while, and you can score about 70%. Without going through the CFAI stuff, I doubt you can get 80+ consistently. Focus on PM and Derivatives, this stuff has very common questions, and if you can master it, you will get most of the questions right.
At this point stick with questions. I have until December, but I’ve gone through everything at this point. Doing lots and lots of questions after reviewing each part and after each book / topic area seems to help me the most. But you seem like you’re pretty smart so perhaps your study tactics are more “efficient” than the likes of average joes including myself :-). So try doing as many Schweser questions, mocks, samples, etc as you can. This is especially so for Ethics as previous commenters have said. Hard to explain, but even after reading all of that (both CFAI and Schweser – felt like killing myself afterwards it was so mind numbingly boring), I felt like I knew nothing – the questions made me get a good feel for the logic behind the code. The more questions I do, the higher I seem to score for that reason. At worst though, don’t think of it as a $600 loss if you fail (actually it’s after March so re-registering is $690), but a chance to make things right and improve yourself for the long haul. Even if you fail, you have 6 more months to actually study like you’re supposed to. At this point you know what you know, so just keep cool and do your best. Do let us know how things turn out once you get your score in July. All the best!
I think you all are getting your legs pulled. I have done 70% of the material in here at UC Berkeley undergrad, was a first year Phd econ student before I realized that I was in over my head, I work in business banking so review financial statements regularly and fix my underwriters mistakes, and I have been studying consistently for the last 4 months still in high 70s, low 80s on Qbank. I dont believe for a second that someone without a background in bus/econ could study for 1 week and pass.
Hey, I go to Cal :). Again, I haven’t passed and I’m making plenty of mistakes on the questions I’ve been working on today. Seems like some areas I really understood and other areas I feel like I never even saw at all. Trying to patch some of those up now but I’m feeling pretty much toasted. Definitely not feeling like I’m going to pass but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility. From my perspective I’ve got no idea how you could be in over your head if you’re getting your PhD in economics. YOU can’t be for real. Ok so the material is extremely broad, but this economics is nothing compared to what my roommate was doing for 103B last semester, and I saw lots of the Quant back in high school Statistics. And that’s at a California public high school, which is about as low as you can go. Haas couldn’t have done you any favors, that place is a bad joke and everyone on campus knows it. According to the Daily Cal they’re redoing the curriculum in part because they finally figured out that 90% of the students cheat on every exam. Go Bears! Edit: Apologize if that came out a bit harsh, I’m pretty frazzled at this point, ~2 hours of legitimate sleep in 48 hours has taken its toll. Not implying that you cheated @ Haas if that’s where you went, but if you went there you already know its rep.
Also worth considering: maybe this material is easiest to learn fast when you’re starting more or less from 0? No bad habits to unlearn, no areas of prior knowledge that I need to make the CFA material “play nice” with or to trip me up. Whatever, won’t be back to this thread until after the exam. Good luck to everybody.
Fed not everyoone has all day to sit around and cram CFA material, before you start bashing Haas and other undergraduate finance programs. BizBanker, how exactly as a first year PhD student did you have time to study the CFA material? The 3 hours a night you got? or the no sleep on the weekends? That is the point look even the CFAI says you need about 350 hours, if you have a undergrad in economics, you prolly need around 300, if you study 12-14 hours a day…its doable.