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.