Schweser missed a lot of details details

spartan1

I actually passed but I am interested to hear opinions if anyone else felt that schweser missed a lot and sort of missed the boat on a bunch of areas (without going in to details)

sort of making me rethink schweser for level 2

krause2

Schweser is fine for Level 2.

When you take 3000 pages and make em into 1500 pages with a larger font and better spacing, you can either do it by lossing details, or witchcraft.

Will you see one or two of those details on the exam? Possible. Will they make you or break you? Unlikely.

On top of that, do you really think you would have gotten those details had you studied from CFAI? I personaly would bet that in a large sample of students on whom you impose either CFAI or Schweser, Schweser users would perfrom better.

I say impose, because in general if you let people select their books, your study would be biased. People who go for Schweser tend to be people looking for shortcuts to start with and less nerdy than someone willing to read 3000 pages of ****

bodhisattva

I would say Schweser is fine for Level 2. I used it + EOC CFAI ethics, but if I hadn't done the latter, I would've still passed. That said, I studied my ass off:

-did all Schwser problems (including the examples in the noteS)

-all mocks (Schweser + CFA)

and I kept doing them until I pretty much knew a lot, if not most, by heart.

Schweser did miss some things (I checked the notes after the exam to see), so I had to make a few outright guesses. Of course, like the poster above wrote, it's inevitable for them to miss things since it's a condensed version of the CFAI textbooks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at Friday, July 29, 2011 at 08:15AM by daveyc18.

xilinx_altera

I fully agree that its impossible for them to get everything but for level 1 not knowing a few things doesnt have such an impact but i was thinking that on level 2 since there half the amt of questions if i am totally clueless about a few it will have a much greater impact on passing

AndyNZ

To each his/her own. If you study Schweser hard like I did, it's definitely doable. I didn't squeak by with Level II and used Schweser pretty much exclusively. Thus, I and others are proof that CFAI doesn't HAVE to be relied upon.

I will admit, however, Schweser mocks are less representative of the real exam in Level II, but this is expected since the exam questions are much more subjective.

Of course, however, you certainly can't go wrong by using the CFAI textbooks if you study them hard. If you squeaked by with Schweser for Level I and studied it hard, then, yes, perhaps go the CFAI route.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at Friday, July 29, 2011 at 11:48AM by daveyc18.

ninja1024

Lvl 2 passer here n studied Schweser exclusively except cfai ethics EOC.

I'd say 1 in 20 questions, or 5%, of my lvl 1 exam had content I've neva seen b4. Did I freak out and regret not spending another 200 hrs reading cfai? Definitely not. Make an educated guess and move on. Lvl 2 is about 1 in 15 that cannot be determined by Schweser alone.

Candidates must realise that your brain can't memorize all the trivial pursuit questions out there anyway. 3rd party providers have yrs of experience to know what is more likely to b on the exam than all the minor stuff.

tl;dr
Get Schweser and you'll get the majority of questions at least recognisable. CFAI will really blow ur memory out.