Three more weeks until Level 1 exam day

Hello! Hope this week was productive for everyone. Thanks as always for the comments. As some of you pointed out everyone is fully devoted to the studies, it reminded me when I took the exam a few years ago. This is a difficult experience to go through, you must have sacrificed many of the important things in your lives in this process in order to get here today. It’s a long haul in the CFA journey, but it might take less than 3 weeks to cut a deal with the exam. I often admire the confidence of those who walking out of the exam centre know they passed, it actually intimidates me a little as I never had such confidence, I come across more often though with people who had doubts during the exam but most ended up passing, so until the exam result is released, everyone in the room has a fair chance.

With 3 weeks to go until the December 6^th CFA level 1 exam, its final crunch time! I had created a post for level 2 candidates on the second half of the summary but I thought I’d delay level 2 post given the fast approaching level 1 exam and take some extra electronic ink here on level 1 related issues as promised earlier.

Timing

For full time students, you are probably in the best position to take this exam. For those of you who are working full time, I hope you have booked at least 1 week off before the exam day to prepare for this exam.  Speaking from my person experience, I’ve always taken the exams while I had a full time job, and I’ve always taken two weeks off right before the exam day for all three levels. From my conversations with various people, there seems to be a 50/50 divide in terms of how people like to allocate their time for the big “cram”. I heard 2 weeks off a lot, but also know quite a few people who only took a week or 1.5 weeks depending on their comfort level with the exam. My personal experience for level 1 was that two weeks was more than enough, I would probably take more time off for level 2 and level 3.

Material

Your study time is over! If you are still studying new materials at this time, I hope it’s your last study session on alternatives or one of these that had less than 5% of the exam weight. In any case, I recommend dropping all new material at this time and focus only on questions. You can review the material when you practice but there is no time for studying. If you still have more readings, it doesn’t mean you have done a poor job in the last few months, so don’t panic, simply wrap up and start practicing for next 3 weeks.

Practice exams

As a CFA candidate you have access to their online resources, where you can probably purchase online mock exams. The year I took level 1, 2 mock exams were available for $40 each. I was poor and cheap (am still cheap) so I didn’t purchase, had I done this one more time, I will not hesitate to buy their questions as no one, I mean no one, out there is able to come up with questions so close as theirs to mimic the real exam. In more recent years their website went through a series of upgrades, everything seems to be online driven, so take a look at their mock exams.

You would also have access to other exam like materials, I would also recommend that too. Look for practice exams that allocate questions following the exam weights, there are plenty of them out there.

For the coming 3 weeks, these practice exams are your best friend. There is absolutely NO ONE ELSE who can help you pass the exam more than the practice exams. So use them to simulate the real exam, 6 hours in total, 3 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon. Correct your answers in the evening or the next day. Mark my words here, the probability of passing this exam by doing what I said in this paragraph is increase by at least 10% or more.

If you can get a hold of past year exams, it is important to do as many as possible of these exams from recent years, because these are the only questions you will get from CFAI exam writers, and no one knows the exam better than the CFAI.

With this, next couple of weeks should be quite a corrective experience, you will be able to go through questions and find out where you are still weak and what topics you are doing well. Go through all the questions you did the day before and learn from it. Remember to review ethics from time to time, don’t leave it to the last minute.

Don’t panic

Don’t panic! 3 weeks is long enough to pull you back on track if you had properly studied the materials in the past few months. Sometimes it's easy to let people influence you at this time. I get these emails from people who want to sell their stuff which makes me think they can help me pass. Remember YOU are the only person who can make you pass this exam, believe in yourself and the hard work you have put in so far. Follow a rigorous practice schedule for the next 3 weeks, make sure you understand each question you didn’t get right, time the practice exam, keep calm and practice more!