How long does it really take to pass CFA Level III?

that’s awesome, an article pretty much written based on our results thread. Sumz was the one who passed and husband failed and i think CPK or Jeffsick might have been referenced as well.
As a sidenote, the 18 months thing pisses me off as unless you didn’t study at all for level 1 and just turned up for the test in December you took more than 18 months.
 
I did 90% of my studying while on a two week vacation. During that time I studied from the moment I woke up until I went to bed.
Passed with a 40/60/80 score of 58.5, so this is the bare minimum you can do and still pass.
Same strategy for Level 1 & 2 but I passed those with flying colors. Therefore level 3 is harder to study quickly!
 
I had no background of finance before I took level 1. Level 1 was hard enough for me. I had to go through at least browse through all the books in order to pass but agreed the difficulty of level 1 was not comparable to level 3.
Level 2 was okay - personally i found it was easier than level 1 given I had gained knowledge by doing level 1. It was mainly about calculating.
Level 3 was difficult indeed. Because I had other personal commitments so i can’t say how much exact of time i spent. I would say around 3-4 months… I read the books as well as the notes.
 
Level 3 preparation took me about 9 or 10 weeks, thereof 2 weeks vacation.. I basically only learned by doing the practice exams :-) I did all 6 Schweser exams and the CFAI 2014 mock exams and worked with Qbank a lot.. I think I did about 80% of the Qbank questions. Besides I watched some (not all) Schweser Videos to get an understanding of the topics but was only able to read parts of the Schweser Notes and the Curriculum because I had so less time..
But I’m not sure if you should follow my example, because I had a hard time during my studies with keeping my nerve and not giving up and had to deal with colleagues of mine who both started in November, spent several hours a day on studying, read both, curriculum and notes twice and continually told me that I have no chance with my approach.. in the end I passed, I guess quite close to failing, but who wants to know afterwards :-)
 
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