study plan for level 1 studying, provides, material, regarding, recommend

btcapital

1.
About 7 months on each level.
L1: About 300 hours, L2: about 500 hours and L3: about 600 hours.

2.
Schweser 100% and CFAI books for ethics and GIPS.
Also qbank on L1 and as many exercises as possible.

3.
The optimal study differs from person to person.
I did the following (7 months in total):
- 4 months: Read everything and understand as much as possible
- 2 monts: Read everything for the second time and understand everything and remember as much as possible. Do exercises to help you remember and understand.
- 1 month: Do exercises and read fast everything or the parts you don't understand

I studied in the morning before work 5-7 and in morning in the weekends 6-11.

-----------------------------
Mr. Rasmussen, CFA

glamorous

Hello all, I signed up to take level 1 in June and have a few questions regarding how I should go about studying for the exam.
1. How many hours per week did you study?

2. Would you recommend the books that the CFA provides or other material (i.e. stalla, schweser)? If you used other materials what package did you buy?

3. How did you study for the exam?

I really appreciate any help I can get. Thanks

homie

Anyone else care to share their study plan?

waldziuchna

What Schweser study package did you get?

JGovender

-Read all CFAI texts/took notes while reading
--Took about 3 months

-Read all schwesser texts/no notes
--Took about 1 month

-Took practice exams (one per weekend)
-Read Schweser again in weak areas
--Took about 1 month

-Started drilling Qbank (started WAYYYY too late)
-Practice exams
-Schweser reading, supplementing with CFAI texts
--Final Month


solved about 2500 Qbank Q's and maybe 600 mock exam Q's.
My result; Probably a band 9 or 10 fail.

__________

"good personality ... or he was known as Lt. Mandingo during his army days."

Finalnub

Agree with what kingstongal said, esp the last paragraph

farrukhsadiq

Here is what I have done in the last 1 month (I passed Level I, preparing for Level II)
-Reviewed all the questions that I didnt get right in Schwesers Q bank(I solved the complete bank and about 1/3rd of them were wrong in first pass). Noticed my incorrect answers were resulting from same LOS. Went back and reviewed LOS and incorrect answers
-Took all 6 practice exams. 1 day for full exam, and took 1 days for review and 1 more day for reviewing corresponding LOS. I could not clock more than 7 or 8 hours on a full day. I have to take days off (from CFA) between each exams for relaxing (I was totally exhausted by then; if you are planning to take a week off, then plan that your stamina would steeply fall after 4 days or so)
-I created my own notes out of class slides and mistakes I made from above 2.

I was totally unproductive in my last 10 days because of exhaustion, but my notes saved me.

Rather than counting by hours of work, you should count based on how uniformly you would spread those hours over 4 or 5 months; and how you would you identify your weak areas, then improve on it.
Few more tips:
--donot miss on those high scoring areas: ethics+FSA is approximately 1/3 of exam
--quant+fixed income(bonds etc) is 1/5 of exam
--you can imagine that 10% of exam is only theoretical questions(so memorize often). Ex topics are econo, all the theories from other chapters (like GIPS, technicial analysis,CAPM etc)
--again, above 3 tips matter on the exam day (on exam day, I first solved ethics and FSA and then went to other sections)

I have not heard people talking about shortage of time on exam day (though they talk everything else)