we have under 2 weeks left, just curious how much work people r puttin into this. I just got some time off from work so I’ll start:
I’ve been up at 530am everyday for the past month now. I do about 60Questions each day in the morning for about an hr then leave the apartment at 8am to be in the office till 6pm. Get home at 6:40-7pm, eat/watch the news for an hr and then start studying again from 8pm - 11pm.
Yesterday finally my vacation started (not much of a vacaction tho). I am planning on waking up at 530am and study till 10 straight. I tried that today. Woke up at 5:30am, just been doing all types of questions, and its 8pm now and i feel like my brain stopped functioning.
Used to work in banking…10 AM to 2 AM (16 hours) less 2-4 hours worth of breaks is not that crazy. You still get 8 hours of sleep. 10-12 hours is really not that much, that’s just a work day. Pretty much my day is, review a topic, check through all the LOS to see what I need to work on, then do the practice problems. A thorough LOS run through say Fixed Income is a 6-7 hour deal, and then going through 100 Schweser questions on the topic and then reviewing your answers is another 2-3 hours. Fill out the rest of the day with a little ethics Qbanking.
I couldn’t imagine taking this test while working though.
This has really only been my schedule for the final two weeks. Before then it was about 3-5 hours a day.
i think 6 hours is maximum for me…and that is including breaks, periods where no real learning occurs ( around 1-2 hours)…can’t really imagine studying for more than that without diminishing returns rearing its ugly head…but kudos to those who can
Trick is to really switch up the topic once you are burnt out - we can all always use more ethics for example, so after 3-4 hours of fixed income (which can be very mind numbing) you should switch to something more qualitative - maybe review the section on industry analysis, for example.
Also I think really focusing on the LOS keeps you efficient - meaning you aren’t memorizing any unnecessary formulas, and you can always mark a difficult LOS and come back to it later.
My usual tactic is to go through all the LOS for a topic (online with the Qbank) and then do either 50 or 100 qbank questions from that topic (depending if it is a big or small topic) and see how they go. Using this, FSA = 84%, Alt Investments = 94%, Fixed Income = 94%, Economics = 65% (obviously the hardest for me…). Moving on to equities today. Obviously these will drop as the things are less fresh but the plan is to do the mocks this weekend and see where I need to polish up over the last seven days. Ethics (have NOT done a thorough review yet) is around 75% and my plan is to just exhaust the 500 or so Qbank questions over the last few days before the exam and read the blue box examples.
I can’t emphasize enough sticking religiously to the LOS. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people on this board asking questions about things they don’t even need to know.
All you guys are insane or you don’t have any life outside of CFA program. I’m winding down my study time to two hours per day and doing questions and answers and will not study on Friday. The last thing I want to do is burn myself out before an eight hour exam.
Jesus christ ricky, I think my longest day has been 3.5 hours, with most being between 1-2.5 hours. But I locked up the playstation and all my tv remotes at the office and might even do the same with my laptop/ipad. I’ll bore myself into studying haha.
Shooting for 2-3 hours on the week days and 5-8 on the weekends. This is with a full-time job and life outside of CFA, but still being fully committed.
