Exam Strategy 7 - Practice questions

Hello everyone. Hope you are all pressing hard on the readings this weekend. It’s close to mid October, with 7 more weeks before the exam, your readings should be near the finish line in the next 2 to 3 weeks, and last 4 weeks should be only practicing questions no matter what level you are preparing for.

There were some interesting discussions in the comments last week about relationships and CFA preparation, and thanks to all of those who shared your life experience with us. As you all know, this is a tough journey and it takes a lot of time and energy from start to finish, sometime people stop at a certain level because of other priorities, a change of career path, jobs, or other family responsibilities to name a few, sometimes it is okay to put an exam behind for a few months, keep in mind you can always take it 6 months later or next year, certain things in life don’t come around every 6/12 months.

Having said that, my goal here is the same as yours that is to get you guys pass the exam. If you followed my advice so far, and put in the right amount of hours in the last few months, I would think you have completed most of the larger readings in the curriculum, and my advice here is to wrap up the remaining portion of the readings in the next 2 weeks, 3 weeks at the most, and dedicate the 4 remaining weeks to questions. Here's a few things I want to say about doing CFA questions.

For CFA textbook EOC questions: you might have done some of these questions throughout the preparation.  Or you can also take them as you finish reading each topic. What I did was I divided the books into sections, I did EOC questions once I finish reading each section until I went through all the major sections, but whichever way you feel more comfortable should be fine.  My experience with the CFA curriculum is some questions are very wordy in the books, I didn’t think they were representative of the actual exam questions (for l1 anyways), so I only did a selective few per section. If you have enough time, I’d recommend practice as many EOC questions as possible but remember you goal is to get as many done as possible before the exam, so don’t get stuck on the wordy questions too long.

When working on any questions, I created a system to categorize all the questions I have done, for example, questions where I got the answer wrong I marked them with a cross. For questions I needed to revisit (but I got the correct answer), I marked with a circle.  So I know exactly how I felt about each question when I go back and review them in a week. This way it helps me to determine how much time I should put in to review each question. It helps answer questions like: should I ever bother looking at a question again review? Or should I review it very carefully?

For any questions I did, if the question tested something I had not registered in my knowledge base, that means it’s brand new knowledge points, I would go back to my study notes and add the new stuff just next to my original notes in red, or at the end of the study section.  I did this in red ink as I have said before, bright colours help me remember things.

It is extremely important to know your strength and weakness in this process, by keeping a high level record of how many questions you have done and how many you got wrong in each test.  The point is to recognize your average marks in every testable area. You may not know your overall performance until later on in your preparation, that’s perfectly fine.  Overtime, this process will understand how you perform in each section, so you can design your study with a clear target to improve your marks in the weak sections. Once you have a sizable question bank, make sure you review them carefully at least once using the system I described above but with your own elements in it.

Time is of the essence, so you must optimize the expected ‘rate of return’. This is a game where you compete with time, your ‘rate of return’ is the number of ‘smart’ questions you have practiced that will help you pass. Notice here I said ‘optimize’, not ‘maximize’.