How my friend got stuck on Level II studying, earlier, putting, started, friend

cyber21

With only days remaining until the Level I & II results, I’d like to share a story to “comfort” those who did not make it this year. I know it’s not a very comforting story, but if you fail you should know you are not alone and there are lessons to be learned.


A friend of mine was stuck at Level II, and after 3 attempts, she is not “putting it on the side”.
I started around the same time she did, in fact, she got into the program earlier than I. She passed Level I with a week of studying and she felt pretty confident about it so she under-estimated the difficulty of Level II.
So once you fail once, you should know better, right?
Well, she has this “strategy” I would like to share and perhaps debate about, she only wants to focus on the topics she’s good at and completely give up on the ones that are not intuitive for her (and do not weigh as much as others).
She went into your second and third attempts completing ignoring stats and alternative investments (and i think fixed income?), and obviously… she failed.


Her theory is that, she’s never going to score really high on those sections anyway, she may as well just bet on getting 1/3 of the questions right with random answers. Since the curriculum is so large and she can only efficiently study and retain so much information, she decides to focus on the bigger topics (ethics, accounting, corp finance, equity…) in hope of passing the exam on average.


Her strategy makes sense to me (somewhat), though i didn’t follow it, but i’m wondering, if anyone else followed a similar strategy and what’s your outcome??
NANA

wake2000

The whole point of CFA isn’t just to get a piece of paper that says “hey you’re a charterholder”.  It’s about the journey, not about the outcome.  If you ran a marathon next weekend without any training, would it be fair to say that you are in awesome shape?  No!  If you took CFA without delving into the curriculum and really trying to understand and grasp ALL the material - are you really deserving of this designation?  Probably not.  People that try to cheat the system usually fail.  That’s why the test is designed as it is.  If you skip a section with the intent and hope that you get 6/6 on another section - pretty risky strategy.  Especially since there are thousands of pages of reading.

BC_MBA_student

i would rather spend 2x time memorizing everything once and pass and get it out of the way, than half-arse it for several years with nothing to show for it.  Just makes sense.

mkytz15

Hi Nana. Plain and simple, your friend is lazy. Saying there’s no way that a person can retain all the information in level 2 is a copout. So after level 2 her brain is completely full? How will she pass level 3?
If you want to be a good friend, tell your friend this. Tell her to face the fact the she is lazy and overcome it. Level 2 is an exam you don’t want to leave to chance. If you’re serious, plan to succeed and give yourself a wide margin of error.

jacksparrow

^The problem with Nana and Itera’s theory is–they are assuming you get 100% of the questions that you studied for.  If we KNOW for a fact that this is the case, then I wouldn’t bother studying for PM/Econ/Quant at all, because you’re still guaranteed a pass.
But in real life, even if you study FRA/Equity (which will be around 50 questions) like a beast, odds are slim that you’ll get all 50 correct.

mp3bu

In theory, it works, but on a small scale.  say you skipped Derivatives.  5-15% is a big range, but if you really can nail down the others, that’ll still get you a pass.  worst case, say derivatives ended up being 15%,  statistically, you should grab 5% with random guessing.  you max out at 90%.  That’s still a lot higher than the 70% safe range.
As soon as you start gambling skipping 2 or 3 sections, then your chances of failure increase dramatically.

Viceroy

Why on earth will anyone skip sections? This amazes me, knowing that the MPS may just be anything; unlike the regular exams where the MPS has been pre-announced.
You run a risk of being outperformed by other candidates by gaming the sections. Wrong strategy anytime! Moreso, for all the curriculum is worth, I will focus more on the topic areas that do not come readily to my mind. That way, I think I will get the most out of the CFA. You do not want the charter without knowing your stuff!

hassan

Off topic!
I’m wondering, MissCleo, how come you call yourself a ‘guy’?

Darien

Skipping a section in itself is taking too far. I get slaughtered each time in Alt Investments because I use this strategy. But I just cant learn Alt Invs and Level1 and 2 I got less than 50 And this year is going to be no different.
But I love FRA, Corp Fin, Equity and FI just like Greenman said. This is more than 50% and I like these subjects.. Will not skip one line in these subjects. But I read Economics, Quants selectively. If a topic doesnt look intuitive to me (lots for me in economics actually), I just read it once so that I dont miss out on straight forward questions And I am not one of those smart learners, I spend loads and loads of time infront of the book

PieMan

There’s no way I would skip a section of studying and gamble that it won’t be asked or count for as much. I would have LOVED to skip derivatives, hated every second of it. But when I sat for the exam I was sure happy I studied it.
The advice I hear often about CFA is that it’s way better to know something about everything than everything about something. Because even if you know ‘everything’ about 70% of the sections, during the exam you might get thrown a curveball that you never expected in the sections you thought you were well prepared in (it’s impossible to truly know everything cold about a section unless you memorize every word in the text and could mentally index through it), and then you may have made a human error somewhere (flipped a digit on a calculation, improperly filled in an answer, etc). That stuff adds up and before you know it, you wish you would have studied the section that you didn’t know anything about so you could have at least gotten some points to make up for those moments.