Practice ?'s vs. Reading? practice, multiple, continue, long, first

yuoska

Because CFAI BB/EOC ?s after each reading was taking too long, I changed my initial strategy to just focus on reading/taking notes from Schweser for my first pass thinking I’d do ?’s afterwards.  However, now that I’m trying to drill topics w/multiple choice q-bank ?’s (not even item sets!), I feel like I didn’t retain ANYTHING.  I’m either totally guessing on the Qbank mc ?’s or at most narrowing the choices from 3 to 2 answers.
Not sure whether I should continue to drill practice questions (as everyone says questions  reading) & hope in the next few weeks everything will come together to better position me for a second pass or just start my second pass now seeing how little I retained.  Does anybody else feel this way?  Really starting to get anxious/stressed that I’m just wasting time, which further demotivates me/ruins my performance

meghanjackson

I guess I’m just getting stressed/frustrated b/c whenever I read it feels like words on a page and I’m just not connecting/retaining the material - and when I move to practice questions - I feel like I’m just guessing or at best narrowing out 1 wrong choice…haven’t even attempted any of the EOCs/item-sets yet.  I’m hoping things will turn-around for the better once I finish this major project at work, but for now, my poor performance is really getting to me….

TheMBAGlover

I think the lack of retention is not an issue, when you start getting into the EOC questions and a like a schweser qbank it will come back quickly and you will probably retain it. At least thats what happens to me.

prashantsahni

I think as long as you give yourself enough time to review in May (ie. completely finished readings in late April) you should be fine.  L1 I did the concept checkers as I went, but by the time I got to revision I couldn’t remember anything from those first sessions anyway so realistically I’d jut power through the readings and have more time to practice everything at the end.

kseniaru

My first pass I am just reading through the Schweser notes doing the concept checkers at the end of chapters and the problems throughout then I plan on really drilling in the practice questions in my second pass through and utilizing the lecture videos from Elan and CFAI EOC questions.

Zestt

I agree the CFAI EOCs and BBs take a lot of time. That’s why I’m keeping them for my second pass.
My strategy is to watch and read a particular reading and then do its MCQs in a couple of days. Waiting for a couple of days is important because when you just study a reading, it stays in your short term memory. So naturally, you’d get most of the questions correct then. But if you do it after a couple of days or even 3 days, then it really tests your understanding and makes you think and recollect harder. This worked for me in L1 because I retained the material for a longer period of time.
Reading and practice goes hand in hand. If you just read, you wouldn’t retain much and if you just practice, you wouldn’t be able to get many of them correct.