Exam strategy - 4

Hello guys, hope everyone is having a productive Thursday night and is all pumped for a full weekend study schedule on Saturday and Sunday. I understand many of your guys found my post on studying on weekends quite depressing, sadly true, but if you have a full time job, this is the best opportunity to get through some LOS’s. I know sleeping in would be so nice after a long week at work, just remind yourself there’s 80 more days before exam day, hurry up to maximize your marginal utility in the CFA studies and place your indifference curve tangent to your CFA demand curve, trade off your play time for more study hours :) If you can use my weekend story for motivation, don’t hesitate to do so, just know some people somewhere are studying harder than you.

Assuming an average person takes 5 to 6 months to study for each of the 3 exams, most candidates should have put in about 8 to 10 weeks of work so far. Ideally you have created your own study summary while you go through each LOS in the past few weeks, question remains: did you take the best notes that will put you above the pass rate? If not, with the 2.5 months left, how can you improve?

I can never overstate the importance of the very first point I made on this blog about the LOS command words. Whether you are using the CFAI curriculum or any other providers, always go back to the base and understand what you are expected to do. Same goes for your note taking. Candidates need to not  only take notes on definition and formulas, but also pay special attention on underlying relationships between concepts that occur in different chapters and how each topic is inter-related to other chapters.

For example in l3, you understand personal profiling using key factors such as time, tax, liquidity, legal, unique circumstance. From l1 and l2, you also understand the risk characteristics of bonds and equities securities. The exam, however, will not test these concepts alone. You will need to demonstrate you understand the client financial needs by applying the tools, and recommend an appropriate asset mix based on the risks of different securities classes.

So writing down the knowledge points will help you, but only to a certain extent, in helping you memorize what they mean, you must understand and be able to apply the underlying relationships that support these concepts in a question set.

While you are doing that, leave some space on the sides or between lines, so later on in your review you can add more notes, you can even use your favourite colour pens!  I realized I didn’t truly understand many knowledge points reading for the first time.  It was until I did questions and reviewed these questions, I started to register these concepts, so what I did was I kept adding supplementary notes in red next to the corresponding LOS on my notes.

So by the end of my 5 month studies, I had not only created my study notes, I created a fantastic notebook of CFA proven knowledge network that’s interrelated with one and other. This approach helped me reference back to the LOS/knowledge points every time I encounter new questions of the same topic. It made studying so much easier for me to go back and forth to reference between chapters that are tested in the same question set.

One last note before I leave you to your studies tonight, use a colour pen and be creative!

Have a great Thursday evening.