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

Kapie

pass level 1 in 1 week.
Is this a joke

defour44

I had a similar strategy and although i am still awaiting my results, I will be very lucky to survive the July 23rd onslaught.
Nothing to argue here - it is a foolish decision!  I neglected Economics and Alternatives.  My reason?  well, they are just too darn long and the topics do not come easily to me like the others.  This paid off very well in the mocks, but who could have foretold that Derivatives -which was supposed to be one of my major stregnths - would throw me a curveball? or that Alternatives which i foolishly left out, would be 10% and not 5%?
This should serve as a lesson - don’t ever underestimate any subject/topic area …and careful to not be overconfident on what you think your strengths are.

canadiananalyst

bloodline
You never know, as the overall score matters, so do not tear yourself for now, good luck!

defour44

It comforts me to know people skipped sections…because I didn’t, hope thats not too messed up. Couldnt imagine going into the test not having touched a section.

former

I did the same thing–more or less.
It sounds like her mistake is that she completely ignored those sections.  Like the great philosopher Andy Holmes said, “You have to know a little about everything, and a lot about some things.”
I definitely focused my attention on FRA, Corp Fin, and Equity, because 1.) I’m good at those things and 2.) They comprise 50% of the whole test.
I focused less on the others, but still studied enough that I hoped to pick up all the easy questions.

YAhmed

I tried that the first time I took level 2 and got slaughtered. People who tried that for this go round with Alts got slaughtered. Probably best to just brush up on everything. I’m not the smartest guy in the world but even I can fight 95% of the material in my head.

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.

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

hassan

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